Customer Reviews

The Last Great Auk: A Novel

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Really, this is quite an unforgettable book. I remember first reading it as a child. I never came across the book again (it was from a library) but occasionally thought about it and always hoped to find it. Now The Last Great Auk is in print again, and some 25 years after I first read it, I find it still captures and holds my imagination like few other tales.

The Last Great Auk tells the story of one particular member of a large group of the last remaining Great Auks - flightless birds that were the North Atlantic's equivalent of penguins. Eckert's prose is simple and restrained - understandably it can appear in a childrens' library - but the themes he explores and the emotions he works with are deep.

We follow the auk through his growth and along his great migrations, as he and the species' remaining thousands face the yearly challenge of swimming from Iceland to winter on America's eastern coast, and returning months later. Along the way, our auk must face and overcome challenges that are no less fearful for being so familiar. We empathize as he struggles through youth, loses his parents, faces indifferent Nature with courage, and wills himself to survive and win.

Eckert's writing is descriptive and convincing, but it is the familiarity of the bird's predicament, and his courage that we hope to share, that makes us relate to him so immediately. The loss of a species may seem abstract, but the loss of a friend is all too real. The Last Great Auk pays homage to the lost multitudes by following the tragedy of their single last survivor.

Along the way we are reminded - if we care to think about it, because this tale never strays from simply describing the auk's life - that life and death are not experiences unique to us, and the fact of our being is little different to those other expressions of life around us.

A universal story, beautifully told.