Author: Diane Ackerman

Antonina Zabinska kept a diary through the German occupation of Warsaw, and Diane Ackerman built The Zookeeper's Wife out of it. Antonina and her husband Jan ran the city zoo; after the bombing killed most of the animals, they used the empty cages and the villa above them to hide some three hundred Jewish people moved out of the ghetto, feeding them and passing them on. Norton published the book in 2007 and Niki Caro filmed it in 2017. Ackerman is a poet as much as a reporter, and her other work runs to natural history: A Natural History of the Senses, which became a PBS series, and The Rarest of the Rare, which follows biologists to short-eared bats, monk seals and golden lion tamarins and argues the case for each. She holds a doctorate from Cornell and has a molecule named after her.