Love, Life, and Elephants

March 26, 2012
Conservationist Sheldrick (Animal Kingdom) gives a lyrical yet droll voice to her rollicking life in Kenya, where she has spent more than 50 years rehabilitating orphaned wildlife. After a peaceable divorce from her first husband, the author marries David Sheldrick, warden of Tsavo National Park, a relationship rooted in their shared passion for assisting feral creatures and preserving the natural world. Against the backdrop of the Mau Mau rebellion and the dawn of the Republic of Kenya, Sheldrick rears two daughters and acclimates to a range of extraordinary new living arrangements that enable David to develop Tsavo into a haven for both animals and eco-tourists. In addition to peppering the book with tender anecdotes about her quirky animal crew (especially Eleanor, her elephant companion of more than 40 years), Sheldrick forcefully captures the conflicts David faces at Tsavo: fighting ivory poachers, agonizing over a mandated elephant slaughter, and challenging a research team planning a needless elephant cull. After her husband’s death, Sheldrick becomes chair of the internationally known David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and keeps busy caring for orphaned animals whom she calls “my solace, my companions, and my sanity.” This rich memoir offers practical insights about learning when to intervene and when to let go. Agent: Patrick Walsh, Conville Walsh.

April 15, 2012
A heartfelt memoir about the author's decades-long efforts to save baby elephants. At 17, the author traveled to Kenya's Tsavo National Park, one of the world's largest game reserves, and briefly met David Sheldrick, the park's first warden. The two met again on her following visit a few years later, when she was newly married with an infant daughter. Sheldrick felt an instant attraction to David, 15 years her senior, and a major arc of the book follows their love story and marriage. As co-wardens of the park from 1955 to 1976, they devoted an enormous amount of energy campaigning against the ivory industry and to raising and reintegrating orphaned animals back into the wild. An internationally recognized and awarded expert in animal husbandry, Sheldrick is the first person to have perfected the milk formula for baby elephants and rhinos and the first person to have hand-reared newborn elephants. In 1976, David was given a supervisory role over all of Kenya's parks, and the couple relocated to National Nairobi Park--sadly, David died of a heart attack a year later. Unexpectedly widowed, Sheldrick founded the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust to continue her husband's legacy of fighting to protect elephants, rhinos and other animals from poachers. While mourning her husband, the author found solace in her conservation efforts. "The wild animals were my solace, my companions and my sanity, and because of them I was never entirely alone," she writes. Her stories about specific elephants are deeply touching. Fascinating, especially to readers interested in wildlife conservation and the rehabilitation of elephants.

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December 1, 2011

Born into a family that arrived in Africa from Scotland in the 1820s, renowned conservationist Sheldrick served as cowarden of Kenya's Tsavo National Park from 1955 to 1976 and is the first person to have figured out how to hand-raise newborn elephants. Here she discusses her love not only for the numerous animals she has rescued but also for husband and cowarden David Sheldrick. A passage detailing a rough-turned-tender encounter with an elephant explains why she wrote this book--and shows that she really can write.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2012
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)