An insightful look at a rare cross-species relationship.
The fate of Asian elephants raises important questions for conservationists.
In this illuminating book, geographer Shell (Geography and Urban Studies/Temple Univ.; Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the Vanishing Geographies of Subversive Mobility, 2015) reports on his visits to the “remote forestlands between India and Burma,” where he followed the trails of working elephants and their riders, called “mahouts.” Strong and amazingly sure-footed, the trained elephants are able to traverse monsoon-soaked landscapes, ford torrential waters, climb up and down mountains, and lift and carry huge weights, making them essential to the logging industry. Of 40,000-50,000 elephants in South and Southeast Asia—compared with some half a million African elephants—about a third are involved in labor. While most African elephants exist in the wild, the working Asian elephants have been domesticated in a process that the author realizes will disturb many readers: “a captured elephant is usually tied up for months on end in the forest, each leg fastened to a tree,” denied food at first, then rewarded with treats for learning commands—or struck on the back or ear with a metal-tipped instrument. Once trained, elephants work days and are released into the forest at night to forage for food and mate, though their front legs are fettered with a chain to keep them from ranging too far. Most are not eager to escape since cooperating with humans protects them from hunters and poachers. Shell describes in detail elephants’ power, ingenuity, intelligence, and “profound feelings of loyalty and protectiveness” that make them so valued. This relationship between human and elephant, the author suggests, is a result of displacement when encroaching farmland pushed animal and human communities out of their original habitat in the plains. Both migrated to forests, where humans, turning to lumbering as a new livelihood, found elephants indispensable. To animal rights proponents who argue that elephants should live in the wild, Shell points out that with little effective protection, their habitat is vulnerable to deforestation. To those who see only a “picture of domination,” Shell makes a persuasive case that the reality is complicated
An insightful look at a rare cross-species relationship.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-24776-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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