Books: Argentina by Owl Light

THE WHISPERING LAND (235 pp.)—Gerald Durrell—Viking ($3.95).

After several weeks of stalking the proper sello (rubber stamp) through the corridors of the Buenos Aires customs house, Zoologist Gerald Durrell was feeling (as his brother, the logodaedalist novelist Lawrence Durrell, might have put it) both phthisic and etiolated. But before long Durrell was again at peace, sleeping under his Land Rover, tormenting a 20-ft.-long bull sea elephant into a cinema-genic rage, using his own big toe as bait to lure a rare vampire bat. The author is a zoophile who tired several years ago of catching animals for other people and, as he...

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