Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story Preloaded Digital Audio Player Author: Visit Amazon's Daphne Jenkins Sheldrick Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1427227624 | Format: PDF
Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story Preloaded Digital Audio Player Description
From Booklist
When Sheldrick (not yet a Dame Commander of the British Empire) fostered milk-dependent orphaned elephants in Tsavo National Park in Kenya in the 1960s, she faced almost certain heartbreak. Unlike the impala, mongoose, dik-diks, and other small mammals that she had raised, baby elephants do not tolerate cow’s milk. Undeterred by repeated failure, she tested new formulas until she successfully saved tiny, fuzz-covered Shmetty in 1974. Since then, she and her team of keepers outside Nairobi have raised more than 200 orphaned elephants, many of whom have returned to the wild. In this highly personal autobiography, she recounts a lifetime of fostering orphan mammals, reptiles, and birds while raising a family and helping her valiant husband develop Kenya’s national parks in an era of political turmoil and rampant poaching. Filled with eyewitness accounts of African conservation, astute wildlife observations, and a touching love story, Sheldrick’s book will delight nature-loving readers. --Rick Roche
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
Africa has never been more vividly described...I read it straight through and it nearly broke my heart...her warnings about the decline of wildlife should be heeded the world over -- Joanna Lumley Wonderfully candid -- Charlotte Kemp Daily Mail Compulsively readable...the more you hear about elephants from her, the more you wonder why they don't rule the world -- Kathryn Hughes Mail on Sunday An enchanting memoir...Baby birds, antelopes, elephants, rhinos and a civet cat all pass through Sheldrick's life -- Helen Brown Telegraph Absorbing, moving...paints a vivid picture of an extraordinary life in the bush that will delight everyone BBC Wildlife Magazine Moving and magical...a fascinating story...touching, funny and written with warmth and compassion Lancashire Evening Post
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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- Preloaded Digital Audio Player
- Publisher: MacMillan Audio (May 8, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1427227624
- ISBN-13: 978-1427227621
- Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
There must be some reason that we love elephants so. The big, strange beasts are among the most popular exhibits at circuses and zoos, for instance. Their participation in such venues may not have done the elephants much good, and neither has the relentless poaching for their ivory. One person who has harnessed a love of elephants in order to benefit the animals themselves is Dame Daphne Sheldrick, a conservationist who has special expertise in raising orphaned elephants and reintegrating them into the wild. The poachers have made lots of orphans, and Sheldrick has had an enormous amount of work to do within Kenya's Tsavo East National Park to try to bring some sort of balance. Elephants naturally loom large within her biography _Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story_ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), but so do the humans she has worked with, and sometimes against, as well as rhinos, zebras, dikdiks, civet cats, ostriches, mongooses, and more. It is a delightful book, with plenty of funny and sad stories, and a charming reverence for fellow creatures. Sheldrick has had a unique and useful life, and her looking back on it for us is generous and instructive.
Sheldrick was born in Nairobi in 1934, and was brought up with animals, and was fascinated by them. Her family put her in charge of an orphaned baby bushbuck when she was four, and her life changed. She was to go on to care for many other animals, eventually meeting David Sheldrick, Tsavo's principle warden. He had superb knowledge about African wildlife, and he had the looks of a movie star, and she lost her heart to him. The two of them both got divorced from their then-spouses, married, had a daughter of their own, and worked incessantly for Tsavo's wild beauties.
Disclaimer: I have visited and given money to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and so should you. Daphne Sheldrick has made a major contribution to wildlife conservation and her work is to be applauded. Her memoir is a somewhat conventional "Out of Africa" story: hardy pioneers, gauzy sunsets, magnificent vistas, and lots of lots of stories about the animals who have come her way. She was obviously deeply in love with David, and yet he strangely remains a somewhat remote character. He is defined by his deeds, as he and other rangers carve out Kenya's wildlife parks and reserves and heroically try to stop the decimation of the wildlife caused by our insatiable demand for trinkets made from ivory and potions made from rhino horn.
It's hard to criticize a book for what it does NOT say, but, having worked for over ten years with another Kenyan conservationist, Wangari Maathai, I have a very different perspective on the history of Kenya that Dame Daphne covers. (If you haven't read Maathai's memoir, Unbowed, I would recommend it.) What struck me most noticeably in Dame Daphne's story was the almost complete absence of black Kenyans. Nearly all of the main characters are white and of British stock. The Mau Mau rebellion is treated as an affront against white settlers. Daphne's daughter studies in South Africa, and some of her relatives retire there to live, but there is only one reference to Apartheid. We get no sense of the conservation movement in the context of Kenya as an independent country. We do not hear from black Kenyan political figures or the press or, indeed, from the poachers. We never learn the biographies of the black attendants who look after and even live with the animals.
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