From Publishers Weekly
Poole spent much of her childhood in Africa and found it a place of enchantment. As a young woman, she returned to Kenya's Ambosili National Park to study elephants with Cynthia Moss. Poole gives an engrossing account of her work and her turbulent personal life. She coped with danger from both elephants and poachers, loneliness, sexism, rape by a gang of men and a devastating love affair. Increasingly impressed with elephants' intelligence, Poole embarked on a study of their vocalization in 1985. Later she was active in the fight for a ban on ivory. She became the director of elephant conservation and management for the Kenya Wildlife Service, training young scientists and making tough decisions on killing elephants. Readers who have followed the story of the African elephant will find Poole's tale especially appealing. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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From Booklist
Poole is an animal behaviorist who has devoted her life to the study of the African elephant in spite of adversity and tragedy. An American raised in Kenya, Poole is versed in several cultures: American, Masai, and elephant. Her Americanism is obvious in her independence and ambition; the Masai taught her how to live in the bush; and the elephants convinced her of their great intelligence. Her intensive involvement with these majestic creatures revealed that they are self-aware, startlingly empathic beings. Poole describes her pioneering work in establishing that, like their Asian cousins, African male elephants experience musth, and that elephants communicate in low-level vibrations that humans cannot hear. Those discoveries are fascinating, and Poole's accounts of her adventures with the elephants are spellbinding; but there's a dark side to this story--the hard truth about the barbarity of poaching, the cruel, sexist politics of science, and the very real danger of being a woman alone in this land of hunters. Poole's profound commitment to the endangered elephants of Kenya has cost her dearly in personal terms, but her contributions to science are legion.
Donna Seaman
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.