Martin Meredith

This was a tough book to read, as I knew it would be--there's a reason it took me years and years after buying it to finally get around to reading it, and a reason it took me a while to finish once I did open it up. That said, I'm glad to have read it and gotten more insight into the long history of humans and elephants. I knew bits and pieces of it, of course, but understanding the fuller progression and the full dynamic of socio-economic factors is worth the heartache of reading this book. I'd hoped there'd be more chapters on conservation/study and the scientific understanding we have of the elephants and their behavior--those chapters were a joy to read, for the most part--but that's absolutely not the focus of this work. The focus is on history and how things have progressed over time, much of it being difficult to read in terms of heartache, smooth as Meredith's writing is.

I'm not sure I can simply recommend this to people who love elephants--it is a painful, dark read. But for readers who want a larger understanding of how humanity came to workshop, work with, and abuse elephants, and an understanding of how our history has progressed with them in terms of both abuse and conservation, as well as scientific awareness, it's a worthwhile read.… (meer)

A big, depressing book that focuses each chapter on a country or a few countries near each other and explains what challenges they faced, especially in building democratic institutions out of the rubble that colonial powers left behind. Transitions to self-government were fast, mostly because Africans wanted it that way, but the Europeans took/destroyed stuff on the way out and hadn’t invited participation before that, so the newly “independent” nations were left without the infrastructure of governance. In many cases, they also had to deal with ethnic divisions that had been exploited by the Europeans to hold on to power. Coup after coup, slaughter after slaughter resulted.… (meer)