Vicki Constantine Croke - The Lady and the Panda: The True Adventures of the First American Explorer to Bring Back Chinas Most Exotic Animal
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THE LADY AND THE PANDA
Evocative and satisfying, The Lady and the Panda is the sort of adventure story that cries out for a film version starring Kate Hepburn.Croke's book offers drama, pathos, even a doomed romance in a remote bamboo forest.
PEOPLE
The Lady and the Panda winds up stranger than fiction but no less poignant. Like its heroine, it stakes everything on exotic glamour.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
[Croke's] arresting accomplishment is to capture the excitement of the true adventure story while dismantling the bigotry behind it.
THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE
An ingenious story Vicki Constantine Croke's account of Ruth Harkness' obsessional journey belongs on every animal freak's bookshelf.
NEWSDAY
Croke's research puts a human touch on a most unexpected explorer. A compelling read not only on pandas, but about the person The Washington Post described as someone who had made the world panda conscious.
ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL
Croke tells the story well, provides an abundance of panda lore and touches on all the relevant issuesenvironmental awareness, cultural imperialism, racism, sexismwithout heavy-handedness.
THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR
[Croke] spins an engaging yarn about her intrepid hero, and does so with verve and empathy, as well as a good amount of panda particulars.
BOSTON MAGAZINE
Croke opens a window into China. She handles a mass of historical and cultural materials, integrating it well with the narrative of Harkness' life.
MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE
Thoroughly detailed and researched.
THE OREGONIAN
The Lady and the Panda presents an extraordinarily independent woman and an explorer who, herself, is well worth exploring.
THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
In dusting off this exciting tale, Constantine Croke returns Harkness to her rightful place in the top rank of zoological explorers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kudos are due for recovering the story of a larger-than-life woman and her tiny, famous panda bear.
KIRKUS REVIEWS
Croke has created an exciting tale, full of the color and spectacle of a lost, exotic era and place.
BOOKLIST
This well-written, exhaustively researched and documented book should be on every library's shelves.
LIBRARY JOURNAL
Exotic, romantic, and vivid, The Lady and the Panda presents a wonderful tale of a remarkable woman and her remarkable adventure. Vicki Croke takes readers on a thrilling vicarious journey through the China of a very different time.
SUSAN ORLEAN , author ofTHE ORCHID THIEF
A remarkable journey beautifully described, The Lady and the Panda brings to life one of the most astonishing and overlooked stories of American adventure, the 1936 quest by Ruth Harkness to bring a giant panda to America. Vicki Constantine Croke's canvas is the mystical and wondrous China of the 1930s, her heroine a most remarkable woman, and her gift the ability to understand that this is a great love story.
ROBERT KURSON , author ofSHADOW DIVERS
Mesmerizing. Vicki Croke has done a magnificent job of immersing the reader in an absolutely fascinating world. I found myself completely absorbed and could not stop reading. Amazing.
JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON , author ofWHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP
Ruth Harkness, the New York socialite who journeyed into the wilds of China to bring the giant panda to America, now has the biography she deserves. In Croke's hands, the intrepid American woman and the con men, dreamers, and adventurers who joined her in the pursuit of the world's most exotic animal spring vividly to life. Part Hemingway, part Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Lady and the Panda is a rare blend of adventure, biography, and zoology. A deeply satisfying read.
STELLA DONG , author ofSHANGHAI
The Modern Ark: The Story of Zoos:
Past, Present and Future
Animal ER: Extraordinary Stories of Hope
and Healing from One of the World's
Leading Veterinary Hospitals
Dogs Up Close
Cats Up Close
FOR MY SISTER, LINDA BIAND
China is a country of unforgettable color, and often, quite unbidden, come vivid pictures to my mindsometimes it is the golden roofs of the Imperial City in Peking, or again it is the yellow corn on the flat-roofed little stone houses in the country of the Tibetan border land.
RUTH HARKNESS
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A NOTE ON CHINESE TERMS : During Ruth Harkness's time in the East, the standard method for the phonetic notation and transliteration of Mandarin Chinese words was the Wade-Giles system, which brought us Peking, Whangpu, and Chungking. Today, the standard is Pinyin, which spells those places Beijing, Huangpu, and Chongqing. This book uses both depending on the context.
SOME MOMENTOUS ENCOUNTERS feel that way from the start. And so it was for me and the story of Ruth Harkness. In the spring of 1993, while researching a book about zoos, I came across a tantalizing story that even in the barest outline electrified me. In a special anniversary issue of the magazine published by Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, and in a follow-up conversation with the zoo's marketing director, I learned of Harkness, a dress designer and socialite, who in 1936 took over her dead husband's expedition to the border of China and Tibet and captured the first giant panda to be seen in the West. At the time, the panda hunter was an international sensation, and the panda himself once drew more than 53,000 visitors when first displayed at the Brookfielda single-day tally the zoo has never again matched.
Harkness's likeness would shine out from newspapers, magazines, newsreels, comic strips, and advertisements. Her panda would make the front pages of the Chicago Tribune for a nine-day stretchsomething one newspaperman told her wouldn't have been done for anyone else, including the president. No animal in history, the lofty Field Museum reckoned, had gotten such attention. Ruth Harkness would become a heroan unlikely one, for sure, but Americans have always liked that kind best. And her accomplishment would be so well known that The Washington Post would proclaim that every high school child in the land knew her name. She would succeed, the paper said, in making the world panda conscious.
It sounded impossiblenot just like fiction but like fantasy.
Yet today, few know anything of the saga.
Growing up, I had loved tales of adventure, particularly those from the animal world: Kipling's
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