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West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge: book review




West with Giraffes (2021) is set in the San Diego Zoo in America from September 1938. It is inspired by a true story.

 

During the Great Hurricane of 1938, the damaged merchant freighter SS Robin Goodfellowis pulled into the port of New York – with two crated giraffes that miraculously survived. They were shipment, on their way to the San Diego Zoo. 

 

Woodrow Wilson Nickel is the narrator, telling the story of how the hurricane giraffes make the 12-day road trip west from New York to California. After quarantine, he travels west with the giraffes in a custom-made, green Packard truck to deliver the San Diego Zoo’s first giraffes. The zoo director, Mrs Belle Benchley was waiting. 

 

By now, everyone in America knows that the East African giraffes are on a unique road trip: ‘Cars and bicycles fell in behind. Old men waved from stools and steps and bungalow porches. Women in housedresses stood on verandas holding up babies’ and the newspaper announced that ‘those spots before your eyes were real …’

 

The first obstacle was a low bridge. And there were mountains to climb, and flat tyres, and press photographers, and stories to fill 500 newspapers. The closer to their destination, the closer becomes Woodrow Nickel’s connection with the giraffes: ‘Surrounded by such colossals, I should have felt shaky and small, yet their mammoth presence made me feel big, and calm, and sweetly safe in a way hard to describe … I found myself overcome with feelings for them that I couldn’t hold back.’

 

Crossing through Tennessee, Woodrow has his 18thbirthday – a birthday to remember. As his colleagues, the driver and the veterinarian, said: he was a boy doing a man’s job. 

 

Ocean to ocean, the male and female giraffes, that Woodrow called Boy and Girl, arrived at the zoo. Mrs. Benchley called them Lofty and Patches. The newspaper journalist described ‘their serene grace and ethereal beauty.’

 

This is an interesting true story, coupled with reconstructive embellishments, about survival against all odds, and grace under pressure. 






 

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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