The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony, with help

1/2

Snapshots from his efforts to introduce a small herd of wild “problem” elephants into his South African game reserve. My experiences with “problem” goats had me relating very much to many of these incidents; sympathizing wholeheartedly with members rejected by the herd and babies born deformed; and seeing the same emotions and smarts we attribute to ourselves in our fellow mammals. We’re all cut from the same cloth.

Anthony’s descriptions of ‘communicating’ with his herd do not devolve into the unbelievable or anthropomorphizing – though many of his brink-of-disaster stories do sound almost unbelievable; still, I feel they were too crazy for someone to have risked making up. His descriptions of the Zulus who inhabit the country with him are fairly even-handed; they are portrayed as individuals, but it’s always a fine line, and they do always feel a bit “other”.

Anthony develops relationships with this herd because they come to him with problems that must be overcome – they need to learn to trust him and accept his reserve as their new home. Ultimately, though, the saddest part of the book is the end where we are reminded rather suddenly that Anthony is really running a game reserve, not a petting zoo. His reserve is a place for wild animals to live wild. Thus, he develops no relationships with the newer additions to the elephant family. Presumably he does not even give names to the new babies anymore. That felt sad, but right.

Happy by Derren Brown

This book didn’t make me happy. Frankly I skimmed a lot of it. I thought it was going to be a kind of self-help guide to applying Stoic principles to a normal everyday life. But lots and lots of it was the author’s personal feelings about fame and his weird psychoanalytic digressions on relationships. Derren Brown apparently has some small amount of fame in the UK as a magician of sorts. So we get to hear about how he feels about that. I didn’t care. Nothing he said about relationships ever really resonated with me. And when it was actually about applying stoic principles to modern life, it wasn’t the best treatment of the subject I’ve ever read, either. Still, I had some takeaways. You know how we think about what we would say if we could go back in time and talk to our younger self? Why not imagine that your older self has come back to talk to you? What do you imagine she’d say? Mine would probably say something like, “Relax, idiot, enjoy life.”

The New Republic by Lionel Shriver

My fourth Lionel Shriver and alas my least favorite.  Granted, it’s three stars – I read the whole thing and was interested each night to get back to the story.  But nobody was likeable, least of all the awful main character, who had something snide to say about EVERYONE; and since it was told from his perspective, the over all vibe was relentlessly ugly and negative.

The protagonist, Edgar, switches careers midlife to become a journalist; and he is sent to Portugal to cover a fictional separatist movement.  The area and the ethnic group Shriver is writing about are fake; but even so, I winced at her constant disparagement of the environment and its inhabitants – can something be “racist” when the “race” it’s taking shots at is entirely fictional?  I think so.  This is beyond having a nasty protagonist with a tendency to put everyone down – Shriver is the narrator and she’s no better than her character.

I’m neglecting to mention a significant part of the plot – the mysterious disappearance of the journalist who preceded Edgar.  I guess I didn’t much care.

I don’t want to give away spoilers; what drove the plot and my interest was how Edgar chose to become involved, at first very peripherally but then more and more directly, in the violence that is at first distant from him, then literally surrounds him.  This is what kept me coming back night after night.