The power of the animal-human relationship

Saman­ta Bloom’s sto­ry first made its way through social media and, via two book releas­es, also through the print press and is now known world­wide. The sto­ry has been some­what can­ni­bal­ized, but despite the media expo­sure, still very sym­pa­thet­ic.

It began in 2013 with a seri­ous acci­dent involv­ing the moth­er of three dur­ing a fam­i­ly vaca­tion in Thai­land. As a result, she retained a para­ple­gia and expe­ri­enced many unpleas­ant things that each affect­ed per­son knows how to tell in his own unique way. Then two things came togeth­er. First, a lit­tle bird entered the fam­i­ly life and sec­ond­ly, the hus­band and father Cameron Bloom is a pho­tog­ra­ph­er by trade. In sum, this result­ed in numer­ous pho­tos in the social media, which received a lot of atten­tion.

This result­ed in a pho­to­graph­ic book that found its way to Ger­many in 2017. A detailed review of this book can be found on my book blog (only in ger­man: Pen­guin Bloom: Der kleine Vogel, der unsere Fam­i­lie ret­tete). This pic­ture book was framed by the nar­ra­tion of Cameron Bloom as pro­logue and a let­ter of the moth­er Saman­tha Bloom as epi­logue. Already this com­bi­na­tion of illus­trat­ed book and nar­ra­tion was very emo­tion­al and trans­port­ed this sto­ry very impres­sive­ly.

In 2021, the book by Saman­tha Bloom then also found its way to Ger­many, in which she tells in great detail about her life and how she had lived before and after her acci­dent (I also pre­sent­ed this book in more detail on my book blog (only in ger­man): Wieder fliegen ler­nen: Meine Geschichte). It is also this book that was made into a movie with Nao­mi Watts.

The book starts out very dev­as­tat­ing.

Since I only have the books trans­lat­ed into Ger­man, there may be trans­la­tion issues when I trans­late them back to Eng­lish.