It sounds like an ecothriller: a circus performer-turned-zoo owner battles a corrupt Central American government and corporate interests to stop dam construction that threatens the last scarlet macaws in Belize. But Barcott's tale, a lively combination of travelog, history, and nature writing, is narrative nonfiction at its best. (LJXpress 2/5/08) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A sharp account of an eccentric woman's efforts to save the last 200 scarlet macaws in Belize. Barcott (The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, 1997)--a contributing editor at Outside magazine, where this book began as an article--takes readers deep into Belize, a former British colony between Mexico and Guatemala noted for its lush wildlife, English-speaking refugees and oddballs and quiet government corruption. The protagonist is middle-aged Sharon Matola, an American-born former lion tamer who came to Belize in 1982 to work on a nature documentary and remained to establish the Belize Zoo, a home for orphaned and outcast animals. The "Zoo Lady," who shares her office with a three-legged jaguar, earned the Belize government's ire in 1999 when she opposed plans to build a small dam in the remote Macal River Valley. Designed to generate much-needed electricity, it would have destroyed the nesting grounds of the nation's remaining macaws. Barcott details Matola's anti-dam campaign, which began with letters to officials and newspapers and included protests in Newfoundland (the base for the dam's owners) and a legal battle that was decided by the Privy Council in London. While Belize officials tried to stop her by proposing to build a new garbage dump adjacent to her beloved zoo (she defeated that project), Matola pressed her anti-dam campaign with support from the Natural Resources Defense Council. Along the way, Barcott explores dam-building, species extinction and the history of the charismatic--but not endangered--macaws. For all her efforts--including revelations of geological deceptions in the dam planning--Matola lost the battle, and the Chalillo Dam, commissioned in 2005, put the macaw nests under water. Matola vows to keep fighting on behalf of wildlife; she is currently working to bring the harpy eagle back to Belize. An engrossing but sad account of a brave and quirky champion of nature. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

EVER since Sherman McCoy's boating moccasins touched down on Park Avenue 20 years ago, readers have been offered plenty of fictional opportunities to eavesdrop on the residents of the Upper East Side of Manhattan via their lovers, their kids' teachers, their oppressed editorial assistants. Inevitably, the critics complain that this new ZIP code 10021 genre can't stand up to the past work of Edith Wharton, Truman Capote and Louis Auchincloss, or to Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities." Wharton herself frowned on employing her own tribe as protagonists, noting in her autobiography, "A Backward Glance," that "the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would ever again be poured." Novelty would be a reasonable goal, if the next chronicler of New York's social aristocracy could find new manners to exploit comedically. I very much wanted Alex Witchel's second novel to be that perfect skewer. And it does succeed in spots, in tart lines that navigate "a world as treacherous and absurd as this one," but not in ways that contribute to a wellrounded story. "The Spare Wife" its title is emblematic of the freshness within presents a challenge in the sorting and caring departments. A few too many people walk through its pages and dine at its tables, cameo relatives and exhusbands whose introductions feel like digressions. Most of the dozen or so main characters (mostly media executives, financiers, writers and doctors) are assembled at two dinner parties that bookend the novel. In the opening scene, Jacqueline Posner gathers friends and influential strangers at her Park Avenue duplex, ostensibly to introduce its next owner but really to signal that her impending divorce will not upend her sumptuous lifestyle. At first, Jacqueline seemed to be Witchel's protagonist, but soon enough I realized she was merely my ticket in. The spare wife of the title turns out to be her pal Ponce Morris, 42, a widowed modelturnedlawyer, blond and classically beautiful. "Ponce is really an imaginary friend for the middleaged man," one guest notes. "She watches football with Stan Crandall, while Bitsy reads magazines in bed and thanks God she doesn't have to; she plays golf with George Stein, because Carol only likes tennis; and not only does she go to Knicks games with Larry DeLynn but she lets him eat as many hot dogs as he wants and never tells Lila, who forbids him to have nitrates." (There's also the problem of nomenclature clutter: none of these playmates are in the story.) Witchel's crowd of stars and costars will have roles in an eventual social undoing in a nicely done "Murder on the Orient Express" teamlike way, not as partners in crime but as witnesses to, and exploiters of, an affair between two unlikely philanderers: Dr. Neil Grossman, the city's most successful infertility doctor, and popular Ponce. It's unlikely and shocking because Grossman is truly happily married and Ponce, we've been told, "hates sex ... that's her whole gig." As in Witchel's first novel, "Me Times Three," the principal workplace is a trendy magazine, this time Boothby's, whose successful editorial formula is "the highbrow treatment of intellectually lowrent subjects," what '"The New Yorker' might be if it won the lottery and got a facelift, a younger beau and a place in Rio." There's no question that Witchel is satirizing rather than celebrating the values and raw ambition of "the viperous crew that composed social New York," but her efforts are often undercut by observations that seem both generic and familiar. The executive editor for Boothby's, Mary Elizabeth Shaw (known to all as Shawsie), "managed to still look like a member of the field hockey team from Greenwich High." Surrounding her are characters who sip double skim lattes, air kiss and push food around on their plates in anorectic fashion, whose facial movement is restricted by Botox authorial winks that have worn out their welcome. Too many inelegant lines share the pages with the sharp ones ("Shawsie actually looked the way Katharine Hepburn sounded"), most often when Witchel dips into her characters' points of view while reporting under the banner of omniscience. "You didn't just go home bored with your wife after one of these shindigs," we learn from an elderly newsman's interior monologue. "You went home bored with every broad in the room." As the years pass, he reports, the collective breasts "drooped ever lower (except for the spooky rejiggered racks that now bounced)." And switching to a 20something's point of view is no excuse for "They had great sex, he knew tons of cool people, including the mayor, and they were invited to some really happening parties. She had a total blast with him." Considering the social aristocracy we're spying on, elegance is in short supply. "It lowers the tone," was Flannery O'Connor's complaint about an omniscient narrator employing the vernacular. BUT wait. Halfway through the book, when the setup is complete and the main story finally kicks in, the choreography and the emotional unveilings are clever and most welcome. Newly engaged, I read happily on, eager to see if the talentless editorial assistant would freelance her way to a journalistic jackpot, exposing Ponce's affair with the city's beloved in vitro guru. Or whether Shawsie, her boss, the book's brick, would discover that her pretty young underling was sleeping with her husband or that her best friend since college, Ponce, was compromising the marriage of her obgyn. Witchel is especially good at rendering the hierarchy at Boothby's and its panderings to popular culture. (Unhappily overseeing a fashion shoot with a supermodel, Shawsie notes that "Tikka's ennui, so offputting in real life, combined somehow with the lights and the camera to replace her air of vacancy with one of mystery.") "The Spare Wife" isn't a book with heart, but I'm quite sure it's meant to be no cozier than barbed social satire allows. It's equally clear that Witchel, a veteran reporter for The New York Times, has met these subjects and wants us to know she holds none of them too dear. Elinor Lipman is the author of eight novels, most recently "My Latest Grievance."

Belize is a small Central American country, justifiably famous for its dense forestation. Sharon Matola is an expatriate American, proprietor of the Belize Zoo, the country's most visited attraction and a scientific research station. The scarlet macaw is a stunning parrot, threatened with extinction throughout Central America (Belize's population hovers around 200). Fortis, an international energy company, wanted to build a dam that would flood one of Belize's most teeming river valleys, home to jaguars, tapirs, and a rare subspecies of scarlet macaw. Barcott (The Measure of a Mountain, 1997) brings these four elements together in a riveting account of one woman's fight to save one of the last bastions of an endangered species, as Matola takes on a powerful corporation and the government of her adopted country. Accompanying Matola as she studied the birds in their imperiled forest home, cared for the animals at her zoo, and fought the good fight, Barcott writes of international politics, ecology and endangered species, and human relations with equal facility. This real page-turner of narrative nonfiction is hard to put down.--Bent, Nancy Copyright 2008 Booklist

Barcott (The Measure of a Mountain) relates the dramatic and heart-rending story of one woman's struggle to save the scarlet macaw in the tiny country of Belize. Sharon Matola, an eccentric American who directs the Belize Zoo, learned in 1999 that a Canadian power company planned to build a dam that would destroy the habitat of the 200 scarlet macaws remaining in Belize. Helped by native Belizeans and the Natural Resources Defense Council, Matola mounted a six-year campaign against the dam, undaunted by government officials who branded her an enemy of the state and threatened to destroy her zoo by locating a new national garbage dump next to it-a vindictive act halted only when Princess Anne of Great Britain, which gives Belize millions in aid, planned to speak out against it. But the combined forces of a determined corporation and a corrupt government were unrelenting, even after it was revealed that the power company's geological studies of the site were faulty and the dam could put human lives at stake. Barcott's compelling narrative is suspenseful right up to the last moment. (Feb. 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved