Curious Lives: Adventures from the Ferret Chronicles

I am still reading Curious Lives, but what I have read so far I love. I have enjoyed Richard Bach Books before. Up until Curious Lives my favorite book was and still is Jonthan Livingston Seagull.

I can't speak as eloquently as the reviewers before me, but I wholeheartedly recommend this book. The gentle creatures warm your heart and give you hope for humankind. You will leave this book a better person than you were.

Brimming with true spiritual treasure, "Curious Lives" is perhaps Bach's finest achievement. These bright beings, with their mannerisms and journeys so cleverly depicted, do exactly what ferrets are good at. They get into places that are supposedly impassible and off-limits. In other words they get past our defense mechanisms, right into our hungry hearts and battered psyches. They are a highly evolved race, these ferrets. Theirs is a civilization without malice, greed or violence. With so much energy and imagination freed up for other things, they live in a world with few permanent limitations. Opportunities for adventure are everywhere: under the sea, in a museum, on planes and boats caught in stormy weather - even on a ranch where young ferrets, called kits, learn the ropes and study the stars. A former Air Force pilot and barnstormer who flies his own planes as often as possible, Bach continues to draw much from his own life in these tales. As a boy, he spent two years living on a ranch in Arizona and maintains enormous respect for the animal kingdom. Bach keeps writing books that show us how beautiful life could be if we only remembered the truth about ourselves. Somehow, he makes it easier to remember and to laugh at our own digressions. "Ah mortals. They love to forget," says the an inner critic, portrayed as a dragon, in the story of two writer ferrets. The dragon has much more to say, of course, being a harsh critic and all. But what one ferret learns about the true nature of this entity will be deeply moving to anyone who creates with words. The dragon is given a name: Cinnamon. The writer, Budgeron Ferret, does get scorched, but he's never complete toast.

This is a truly sweet and touching collection of stories about love, good conduct, trust, and living fully. One of the main themes is following your "highest right" and basing your actions on this ideal. In short, these stories are excellent entertainment and also provide good food for thought.

This Hampton Roads reprint is an anthology of five small books written from the viewpoints of five sets of ferrets. Bringing these creatures' accounts under the roof of one book makes perfect sense here, because this really is one story. Furthermore, even as a sum of five books, Curious Lives is only 371 pages long. This book is best read aloud at bedtime with your kids, spouse or lover. Its very nature and purpose entices the reader into a magical time zone to cuddle vicariously in the warmth of being cloaked in glistening soft fur. It is undeniably wholesome; uplifting and inspiring without being sappy or preachy; poetic without being narcissistically grandiloquent. Though the ferret characters are endearing and tender, the author never succumbs to a facile cutesiness in his storytelling. Disney Films, Steven Spielberg and other purveyors of sentimental children's fare stand to learn a lot from Bach's honest, lucid story-telling and genuine wonderment at the deceptively simple things in life. This particular reviewer had an unusually easy time suspending disbelief in order to embrace these ferrets' curiosity, love of the moment, psychologically realistic musings, and joyful message. This is saying a lot, given this reviewer's customary tone-deafness for other people's fantasy, hard-boiled cynicism toward magical thinking, suspiciousness of stories with a message, and difficulty tracking most visual descriptions. I'd recommend saving this treat for a "cold and stormy night", accompanied by a soulful basso continuo of distant train song. Envelop yourself and your rapt audience in fur, whiskers and sweet thoughts.