The IBIC Guide to Books About Nature

(under construction)

Welcome to the IBIC Guide to Books About Nature. This Guide contains the following types of information: More about the IBIC Guides

Sponsorship information

Remarks from the IBIC Editor's Journal

I came to THE FATE OF THE ELEPHANT by Douglas Chadwick because my daughter fell in love with Babar, the King of the Elephants. Within a matter of days, Barney was completely passe, my father was advising all his grandparenting peers to sell their Barney stock, and my daughter was entranced with not just Babar but all elephants. Seeing through her eyes, I learned how pervasive elephants are in our culture. To name only a few examples, she has pointed out to me in the last six months that elephants appear on wall hangings, on National Geographic specials, on tea services, on "Entertainment Tonight" playing soccer, on piggy banks, on the signs outside Pinball Pete's video arcade in downtown Ann Arbor, and in a half-inch square on the bottom right corner of page 657 of the J.C. Penney catalog.

It was in this context that I read THE FATE OF THE ELEPHANTS and realized that elephants are far nearer to extinction than I had complacently believed. I had been taking their existence for granted. Douglas H. Chadwick's fine book made me realize I was wrong, and, moreover, that far reaching changes will be needed in human society worldwide if elephants are ever again to flourish.

The fundamental problem, I learned, is that elephants, like humans, are large, social mammals. They need a lot of range to live in, and they learn. Unfortunately, they do not have enough room--Chadwick reports that almost none of the existing wildlife preserves where elephants live are big enough to sustain a viable population of elephants--and there is nothing that they can learn that will teach them how to cope with the land use pressures caused by a human population that has increased fivefold since AD 1800.

Chadwick's book does not inspire a great deal of optimism about the elephant's prospects. He visits elephants all over the world--Kenya, India, Malaysia--and everywhere finds shrinking populations, crowded by human population growth, inadequately protected by wildlife preserves, hunted cruelly for their ivory. He finds hope only in the elephants themselves--in their warm family relationships, in their capacity for play and delight--and in the human capacity to appreciate and love those qualities. "I want to believe we will ultimately save elephants," he writes, "and that we will do it because we acknowledge and accept their commonality with us." I hope he is right.


Comments from IBIC Readers

Comments from IBIC readers are welcome. Please send a letter to the editor, subject line "Guides [Author/Genre]." Be sure to mention the URL of the page about which you are making a comment.


Editor's Recommendations, Summer 1996

In this inaugural edition of IBIC's Featured Books, I'd like to draw your attention to several titles which have helped to shape my life and thinking.

  • When I was around fifteen, I came across Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's science fiction novel, INFERNO. This '70s remake of Dante's classic describes science fiction writer Allen Carpentier's descent into Hell. It's still a very fresh, accessible take on the classic. What a great movie it would make!
  • The Niven/Pournelle INFERNO immediately inspired me to read the original Divine Comedy. I've read a number of translations over the years, but my favorite is the one by Dorothy Sayers (INFERNO; PURGATORY; PARADISE). The notes are excellent, and Sayers had such a knowledgeable and witty mind that reading her prose is a pleasure in itself. (For those interested in a more contemporary translation, I should mention that Robert Pinsky received excellent notices for his 1995 THE INFERNO OF DANTE : A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION; it's a very handsome book.)
  • I also want to tell you about the late Henry Fairlie's THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS TODAY, which probably did more than any other single book to galvanize me into a lifetime interest in Christianity that led me, eventually, to faith. Ironic, because Fairlie was a self-proclaimed agnostic socialist! But reading between the lines of this insightful and deeply feeling book, one realizes that the love of God cannot have been far from Fairlie's heart.
  • Finally, I should draw to your attention a more recent acquisition, the very handsome NIV STUDY BIBLE (10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION) from Zondervan, indexed and bonded in leather in IBIC's theme color, burgundy (black and brown are also available). The notes to this Bible are amazing. They appear to provide you with a very substantial portion of what you need to know to have an intelligent layman's appreciation of the linguistic and historical issues involved in understanding Scripture.

IBIC now provides seamless links to the on-line ordering system at Amazon.com Books. To order a book, just click on an underlined title. As a default, we link to paperback rather than hardcover editions of a particular title (although we may modify this rule if a hardcover edition looks to be a particularly good deal). Our editorial philosophy is to put your interests first.

Comprehensive Table of Contents | Help

Copyright © 1996 Internet Book Information Center, Inc.

Send a Letter to the Editor