Books like The Memory of an Elephant

House arrest in a hotel, and a man raises a daughter in it.

The Count can give Sofia nothing—no country, no freedom, no future he can guarantee—so he gives her manners, music, attention, and wit, and most of all love. It turns out those are not nothing. They're the inheritance.

I love it for the opposite reason I love McCarthy: same question, no apocalypse, just a man with four walls deciding what to pass on. If you're a parent who feels you have less to give your kids than you'd hoped, this one's a gift.

Who believes men alone have redrawn the maps of the world? Gertrude Bell, beautiful adventurer, mountaineer, archaeologist, writer, linguist, and self-taught photographer, championed Arab self-rule, advising the British military in creating the nation of Iraq after World War I. Thwarted in love, this Victorian debutante set forth on a life as colorful as Lawrence of Arabia, with whom she became a close friend. I marveled at her courage, traveling alone in the vast desert of Arabia with a few native guides, dining with Bedouin chiefs who had never deigned to receive a woman before. It’s impossible to describe her life in a few sentences, but it was a revelation to me that a woman of the Victorian era could accomplish what few men had, while remaining a correct English lady.

Okay, I confess this is the same story as the recommendation above, The Elephants Come Home, but this is written by the actual guy, Lawrence Anthony, who undertook this effort.

Also, instead of a picture book, it is a 380-page tale told by the person who lived it. If you love The Elephants Come Home, you’ll want to read Elephant Whisperer as well.

I found myself exclaiming again and again over the stories that Anthony tells of life on the sanctuary.

It is a novel out of Africa and one that anticipated the end of the empire with relish. Although raised on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, Lessing was always a rebel, and her debut work took an astonishingly bold line in exploring the doomed relationship between a white farmer's wife and a black servant.

The employer is vindictive and racist yet also a hapless dependent and, ultimately, a victim. 

Daphne Sheldrick has written this memoir to give us an insight into her life, saving and raising young elephants and numerous other wild animals with her husband in the Tsavo National Park in Kenya. Her book is hugely inspiring and, although Kenya is strictly speaking not in Southern Africa. South African and East African wildlife are very similar and her description of an orphan sanctuary inspired me to write about such a sanctuary in my own book.

I have included When The Lion Feeds because it is the first “grown up” book that I read as a young person.

It was many years ago, but Wilbur Smith’s novel had a big impact on me with his descriptive writing drawing me into the South African setting. The characters in Smith’s novel make for a strong and powerful narrative, and his imagery is captivating.

In many ways, When The Lions Feed is what could be described as a page-turner. I had mentioned in another review that an indicator of a good story is when the reader feels that they know the character(s), and it is certainly the case with this book.

In the 1930s, Republicans across America heaped criticism on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, which they claimed would wither free enterprise and damage the economy. They labeled him a “socialist”—or worse.

Among the Republicans who broke with this broad Republican assault on FDR was John G. Winant, the Republican governor of New Hampshire. Winant gave up state politics to establish FDR’s Social Security program, and after the start of World War II Winant became FDR’s ambassador to London.

Winant’s courage, first in breaking with his party to join FDR, and then helping Winston Churchill and the British people fend off the Nazi assault, is part of Lynne Olson’s authoritative Citizens of London, the Americans Who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour.

I read this book for research for my own book. The White Rose is the tragic story of Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends, German students who defied Hitler, forming the underground movement known as The White Rose. I was thrilled at the terror of the brother and sister taking chances, distributing anti-Nazi leaflets right under the eyes of the Gestapo. Handsome Hans, heartthrob of his female medical classmates, was the leader of the group, while serious, pious Sophie was his loyal lieutenant. Written by their sister, this account shows there were good people who opposed Hitler, risking everything. I had chills, imagining the terrible price the two siblings paid for their bravery. And my heart ached for their mother, who lost two children to Himmler’s archaic method of punishment—the guillotine.

Talk of the Town is a collection of short stories. Although the author describes foreigners in South Africa and has a political slant, he is not preachy like many other books on such topics. His style is quite witty, observant, and informative from his point of view. All qualities that I admire in a writer.

Some motorcycle travel books say little about the motorbike itself but I like the nuts and bolts in a story of this genre. This book is very much about the bike. Steve’s Ariel was fifty-five years old and he was sixty-six when he embarked on his trip from Capetown to South Luangwa. I identified with Steve; neither of us had any modern gadgetry nor much in the way of mechanical expertise, therefore we both discovered new levels of patience and were blessed with experiencing people’s generosity in a different culture together with spectacular scenery. Like me, he thought of himself and his motorbike as ‘we’; when you travel solo, it is like a partnership. There’s nothing like travelling with a classic motorcycle as your (sometimes frustrating!) companion.