The Last Elephant: African Quest - Softcover

Gavron, Jeremy

3.82

22 ratings by Goodreads

9780006377191: The Last Elephant: African Quest

Softcover

ISBN 10: 000637719X ISBN 13: 9780006377191

Publisher: Flamingo, 1994

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On the trail of the African elephant, Jeremy Gavron has woven a tale that is at once an adventurous journey, a philosophical investigation and an evocative portrait of Africa. This book reveals a creature that can feel pain and happiness, and that communicates in subtle ways with its own kind. But it also shows how the fight for the survival of the elephant, protected by some men, hunted down by others, has become a powerful metaphor for the battle of old Africa to survive in the modern world of automatic weapons and computers. It is this fragile environment, delicately balanced between progress and catastrophe, that Gavron captures.

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From the Back Cover:

On the trail of the African elephant, Jeremy Gavron has woven an extraordinary tale that is at once an adventurous journey, a philosophical investigation and a magically evocative portrait of Africa.

“This wonderful book is for anyone interested in Africa, in elephants, in ecology – and in the brave eccentrics, oddballs who, like Fossey and the Adamsons, devote their lives to animals, and who befriended the author, passing him on from one to another, along a network not accessible to the casual traveller. I wholeheartedly recommend this rich and flavourful book”
DORIS LESSING

“As I reluctantly finished this evocative, perceptive and sensitive book, I knew I had been stimulated to a new awareness about the peoples and animals of this still mysterious land”
VIRGINIA MCKENNA, 'Daily Telegraph'

“Gavron is a lively writer and his subject matter is deeply fascinating – the African elephant, the huge old beast, ancient inhabitant of vast tracts of beautiful and sometimes brutal land, endangered species, metaphor for traditional Africa itself. Energetically and with a quirky sense of both humour and drama, Gavron tracks down the last elephant in Burundi, goes shooting (as an observer) in Tanzania, visits an elephant farm in Zimbabwe, and more”
LOS ANGELES TIMES

“Jeremy Gavron writes with skill and charm about the elephant as a metaphor for the ‘great question’ facing the continent: Can old Africa survive in the modern world?”
THE TIMES

About the Author:

Jeremy Gavron was first enchanted by an African elephant at the age of six, in London Zoo. It took him twenty more years to get to Africa, where he spent two years travelling around the continent as a journalist before being assigned to India. But, as the Swahili proverb goes, ‘he who has tasted the honey always goes back to the honey pot’, and he has since returned to Africa several times.

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