By Bob Tarte
I bought this book off the clearance shelf because of the title and boy howdy did I strike out. I didn’t feel as though this book had one clear objective. The author obviously wanted to brag about all the pets he and his wife kept: birds of all sorts, rabbits, etc… but occasionally would sprinkle dark comments throughout the book about his own depression and dealing with it. It was not clear if he was seriously neurotic or just complaining about being blue a lot. Toward the end of the book he describes how much he enjoys baiting random people into talking about their pets. Then, when the unaware person recommends a type of bird he doesn’t yet own, he launches into a diatribe about how he has so MANY birds and that this specific type of bird might not actually mesh with the disciples of his mighty flock and basically revels in showing off his smart-ass intelligence to an unwitting person that was just trying to be nice and have a conversation with a stranger. Then he goes on to tell the reader about how that particular little trick just wasn’t doing it for him any more so he decided to write a book. At that point I realized that he’s just pulled this mean-spirited prank on his readers. I don’t know the guy and now I think he’s a complete asshole because I fell for his little trick by reading the whole book. In the end his efforts seemed more like a stroke to his ego than a “lighthearted tale of a man and his menagerie” I don’t recommend this book.