For thousands of years, the majestic elephant has roamed the African continent, as beloved by man as it has been preyed upon. But centuries of exploitation and ivory hunting have taken their toll: now, as wars and poachers continue to ravage its habitat, as disease and political strife deflect attention from its plight, the African elephant faces imminent extinction. What will become of these magnificent beasts? As the elephant's future looms ever darker, Martin Meredith's concise and richly illustrated biography traces the elephant's history from the first ivory expeditions of the Egyptian pharaohs 2500 years ago to today, exploring along the way the indelible imprint the African elephant has made in art, literature, culture, and society. He shares recent extraordinary discoveries about the elephant's sophisticated family and community structure and reveals the remarkable ways in which elephants show compassion and loyalty to each other. Elegant, illuminating, and urgent, Elephant Destiny offers a beautiful and important tribute to one of earth's most magisterial creatures at the very moment it threatens to vanish from being.

Elephants are a keystone species and have been a part of the magic of the thickly forested land of South Africa for millennia. This book focuses on the history and work of Knysna Elephant Park, a leading South African elephant research facility that has been home to more than 40 elephants in 25 years. Unfortunately, all the mystique of the Knysna elephant has been reduced to a single elephant left alive. Exploring a wide range of topics, this book covers the impact of elephants' interactions with tourists, how they recover from trauma and even their relevance in human healthcare. Renowned elephant researchers explain the majesty of the elephant brain, which has the largest temporal lobe devoted to communication, language, spatial memory and cognition. To this effect, the book emphasizes the threat of poaching to these gentle giants, which has almost forced them to extinction. Perhaps if humans pay attention to how elephants symbolize our relationship with nature, we can learn important lessons about humanity itself.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel the world and have many adventures? To journey through magical doors, meet new friends, experience new languages, cultures, traditions, and foods. Well, now you can, as you join Destiny in this delightful story. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. Destiny’s Magical Dreams is the fi rst of many journeys to come. So be sure to look for future stories as Destiny travels the world.

Elephants have captivated the human imagination for as long as they have roamed the earth, appearing in writings and cultures from thousands of years ago and still much discussed today. In Thirty-Three Ways of Looking at an Elephant, veteran scientific writer Dale Peterson has collected thirty-three essential writings about elephants from across history, with geographical perspectives ranging from Africa and Southeast Asia to Europe and the United States. An introductory headnote for each selection provides additional context and insights from Peterson’s substantial knowledge of elephants and natural history. The first section of the anthology, “Cultural and Classical Elephants,” explores the earliest mentions of elephants in African mythology, Hindu theology, and Aristotle and other ancient Greek texts. “Colonial and Industrial Elephants” finds elephants in the crosshairs of colonial exploitation in accounts pulled from memoirs commoditizing African elephants as a source of ivory, novel targets for bloodsport, and occasional export for circuses and zoos. “Working and Performing Elephants” gives firsthand accounts of the often cruel training methods and treatment inflicted on elephants to achieve submission and obedience. As elephants became an object of scientific curiosity in the mid-twentieth century, wildlife biologists explored elephant families and kinship, behaviors around sex and love, language and self-awareness, and enhanced communications with sound and smell. The pieces featured in “Scientific and Social Elephants” give readers a glimpse into major discoveries in elephant behaviors. “Endangered Elephants” points to the future of the elephant, whose numbers continue to be ravaged by ivory poachers. Peterson concludes with a section on fictional and literary elephants and ends on a hopeful note with the 1967 essay “Dear Elephant, Sir,” which argues for the moral imperative to save elephants as an act of redemption for their systematic abuse and mistreatment at human hands. Essential to understanding the history and experience of this beloved and misunderstood creature, Thirty-Three Ways of Looking at an Elephant is a must for any elephant lover or armchair environmentalist.

a volume of poetry first copy shop published in 1989 entered into multiple poetry contests contents acknowledged but never printed. the third volume of a series of seven. transcribed from bar napkins, old journals and typed on a manual smith corona.a part of a seven book series based on past writing sophomoric as it may be this is the volume that turns the corner for me. here i believe as does my editor Pati Bubach the wonder of the sky is blue is trumpeted here as the center f the world. the p[ace where i as a writer moved up.

“[A] tour de force examination of the history of ivory . . . and the demise of the elephant and human decency in the process of this unholy quest.” —The Huffington Post Praised for the nuance and sensitivity with which it approaches one of the most fraught conservation issues we face today, John Frederick Walker’s Ivory’s Ghosts tells the astonishing story of the power of ivory through the ages, and its impact on elephants. Long before gold and gemstones held allure, ivory came to be prized in every culture of the world—from ancient Egypt to nineteenth-century America to modern Japan—for its beauty, rarity, and ability to be finely carved. But the beauty came at an unfathomable cost. Walker lays bare the ivory trade’s cruel connection with the slave trade and the increasing slaughter of elephants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1980s, elephant poaching reached levels that threatened the last great herds of the African continent, and led to a worldwide ban on the ancient international trade in tusks. But the ban has failed to stop poaching—or the emotional debate over what to do with the legitimate and growing stockpiles of ivory recovered from elephants that die of natural causes. “Ivory’s Ghost is essential reading for anyone concerned with conservation and with the tenuous future of one of the most magnificent creatures our earth has ever seen.” —George B. Schaller, author of A Naturalist and Other Beast

Why do we think that we can understand animal voices - such as the aggressive barking of a pet dog, and the longing meows of the family cat? Why do we think of deep voices as dominant and high voices as submissive. Are there universal principles governing our own communication system? Can we even see how close animals are related to us by constructing an evolutionary tree based on similarities and dissimilarities in acoustic signaling? Research on the role of emotions in acoustic communication and its evolution has often been neglected, despite its obvious role in our daily life. When we infect others with our laugh, soothe a crying baby with a lullaby, or get goose bumps listening to classical music, we are barely aware of the complex processes upon which this behavior is based. It is not facial expressions or body language that are affecting us, but sound. They are present in music and speech as "emotional prosody" and allow us to communicate not only verbally but also emotionally. This groundbreaking book presents a thorough exploration into how acoustically conveyed emotions are generated and processed in both animals and man. It is the first volume to bridge the gap between research in the acoustic communication of emotions in humans with those in animals, using a comparative approach. With the communication of emotions being an important research topic for a range of scientific fields, this book is valuable for those in the fields of animal behaviour, anthropology, evolutionary biology, human psychology, linguistics, musicology, and neurology.

‘masterly account of the massacre of the African elephant’ The Spectator It is more than a thousand years since the exploitation of the elephant began, when they were most commonly used as war elephants. However, it is only in the last hundred years, with the coming of the ‘great white hunters’ and their special elephant guns, that the very existence of the African elephant has been threatened. ?With an update by John Hanks, WWF’s former leading elephant scientist, this new edition of Blood Ivory tells the story of how the professional hunting fraternity was the first to realise the threat to the elephant and how it kick-started the whole conservation movement. It is not a story with a happy ending, however. It is a tale of war: colonialists against traditional practices and customs; newly independent African countries against each other; poachers and smugglers against any kind of constraint. Robin Brown draws on his depth of knowledge and understanding of Africa and his career as a leading wildlife film-maker to paint a vivid picture of hunting’s impact on Africa’s elephant population, vividly portraying the powerful personalities of those involved on both sides of the massacre.

"All life in all worlds" -this was the object of the author's seventeen-year quest for knowledge and discovery, culminating in this book. In a manner unmistakably his own, Murchie delves into the interconnectedness of all life on the planet and of such fields as biology, geology, sociology, mathematics, and physics. He offers us what the poet May Sarton has called "a good book to take to a desert island as sole companion, so rich is it in knowledge and insight."

"A dazzlingly erudite synthesis of history, philosophy, anthropology, genetics, sociology, economics, epidemiology, statistics, and more" (Frank Bruni, The New York Times), Blueprint shows why evolution has placed us on a humane path -- and how we are united by our common humanity. For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all of our inventions -- our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations -- we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society. In Blueprint, Nicholas A. Christakis introduces the compelling idea that our genes affect not only our bodies and behaviors, but also the ways in which we make societies, ones that are surprisingly similar worldwide. With many vivid examples -- including diverse historical and contemporary cultures, communities formed in the wake of shipwrecks, commune dwellers seeking utopia, online groups thrown together by design or involving artificially intelligent bots, and even the tender and complex social arrangements of elephants and dolphins that so resemble our own -- Christakis shows that, despite a human history replete with violence, we cannot escape our social blueprint for goodness. In a world of increasing political and economic polarization, it's tempting to ignore the positive role of our evolutionary past. But by exploring the ancient roots of goodness in civilization, Blueprint shows that our genes have shaped societies for our welfare and that, in a feedback loop stretching back many thousands of years, societies are still shaping our genes today.