In this day of trophy hunting and ivory poaching, a timely and soulful elephant tale with complex characters.
A novel recounts the experiences of an eclectic group of conservationists, scientists, and safari guides sent on a dangerous expedition to Tsavo National Park in Kenya.
It is 1979, a decade after overpopulation followed by a major drought resulted in the deaths of more than 6,000 of the 30,000 elephants in Tsavo. In their search for food and water, the elephants knocked down trees and trampled foliage, leaving behind a barren wasteland. Now the animals appear to be back. Nobody knows how many there are, but they are once again being hunted by poachers. The International Endangered Species Consortium is funding a safari to count the herds and to determine whether the environment is viable as an elephant sanctuary. Four scientists, two leading conservationists, three experienced guides, and one Maasai game warden make up the diverse coalition of American, British, and African adventurers crossing into the hot and dusty plains of Tsavo to save the elephants. Bruce Airley, a British-American in his mid-40s who was raised in Africa and has a complicated backstory, leads an ensemble cast of characters who find themselves threatened by lions, leopards, deadly poachers, and a hostile indigenous tribe (the Waliangulu) fond of shooting small poison arrows. Plus there are personal challenges—conflicting egos, long-standing rivalries, inner demons—that must be overcome if the group is to survive. Botkin (25 Myths that Are Destroying the Environment, 2015) and debut author Melcher weave together the former’s own field experiences and observations, creating a realistic fictional overlay for the discussion of ivory poaching and human interference with nature. The most beautiful—and most painful—passages center on the magnificent “jumbo” elephants, especially Zamani Baba, the biggest of the big, oldest of the old. He is powerful, fierce, intelligent, and tender: “As the old bull approached, the other two turned their heads toward him. He came alongside and stopped, and, putting his trunk over each, one at a time, rubbed their backs.” The human drama is action-filled and engaging, but it is the elephants that will likely bring readers to tears.
In this day of trophy hunting and ivory poaching, a timely and soulful elephant tale with complex characters.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-949574-04-3
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Book Vine Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
