Macmillan presents cheetahs in this book as a fascinating species. They are full of elegance and driven by singular motives--survival, the race against extinction. Cheetahs are an object of mystery and wonder as we contemplate how they can play such a crucial role to the savanna ecosystem, and yet stay in such precarious danger from the encroachment of farmers, poachers, and other animals. Macmillan's strength in this book is the way she presents cheetahs as providers of meat for other animals and other big cats. She also carefully distinguishes them physically and behaviorally from other big cats. Unlike their relatives; lions, tigers, and leopards; cheetahs are only interested in the hunt for pray, and rarely eat more than they can stomach at a single sitting, leaving the rest of their kill for surrounding predators. In a sense, they are the cicada of the feline world, providing food for other animals. Young readers will appreciate this book for the photographs of cheetahs in hot pursuit. There is also a glossary of terms for highlighted words in the appendix that will be new to readers in the 4th through 6th grade level.

Besides what young readers are mostly interested in (the portion of the text that portrays the cheetah as an elegant cat), I was also intrigued by the way MacMillan handles the final chapter devoted to the efforts of scientists and zoologists at saving cheetahs from extinction. She gives some background, by explaining that 10,000 years ago, scientists have hypothesized a disaster that caused excessive inbreeding among the cheetah population, which greatly diminished the genetic variation among the species. This disaster must have only affected the cheetah, because other cat species show more variation than the cheetah. The cheetahs' greatest strength (it's genetic simplicity) against this disease that killed off three fourths of the variation in its species is also it's greatest weakness (against a different strain of disease). This is a problem standing in the way of understanding how to preserve their species without limiting the economic development of African nations. In captivity, cheetahs show a reluctance to mate because the females lack the choice of the most dominant male, a choice they would have on the Savannah. On the other hand, when eugenicists step in and artificially inseminate female cheetahs with a wide calculation of variation, the females respond by refusing to go into estrus (the fertile period). Faced with animals that won't change their mating behavior in captivity, scientists are losing control over the situation. MacMillan presents this problem as one that can be solved in the science laboratory, with the efforts at harvesting a genetic 'super-cheetah'. I'm not so sure this will be a practical solution, without limiting the growth of private farming and hunting in Africa. ( )