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Title: The White Bone
Subtitle: A Novel
Author: Barbara Gowdy
Narrator: Eileen Stevens
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-24-17
Publisher: Audible Studios
Genres: Fiction, African-American
Publisher's Summary:
A thrilling journey into the minds of African elephants as they struggle to survive.
If, as many recent nonfiction best sellers have revealed, animals possess emotions and awareness, they must also have stories. In The White Bone, a novel imagined entirely from the perspective of African elephants, Barbara Gowdy creates a world whole and separate that yet illuminates our own.
For years, young Mud and her family have roamed the high grasses, swamps, and deserts of the sub-Sahara. Now the earth is scorched by drought, and the mutilated bodies of family and friends lie scattered on the ground, shot down by ivory hunters. Nothing - not the once familiar terrain, or the age-old rhythms of life, or even memory itself - seems reliable anymore. Yet a slim prophecy of hope is passed on from water hole to water hole: the sacred white bone of legend will point the elephants toward the Safe Place. And so begins a quest through Africa's vast and perilous plains - until at last the survivors face a decisive trial of loyalty and courage.
In The White Bone, Barbara Gowdy performs a feat of imagination virtually unparalleled in modern fiction. Plunged into an alien landscape, we orient ourselves in elephant time, elephant space, elephant consciousness, and begin to feel, as Gowdy puts it, "what it would be like to be that big and gentle, to be that imperiled, and to have that prodigious memory".
Members Reviews:
Read this Creative Book...Once.
I read this book years and years ago and remember LOVING it. I couldn't remember the title and mentioned the concept to many friends over the years but never found the book again. With a little effort, I re-discovered and bought the book a month or so ago.
They say you can never go home again. It's not that you can't physically find your way there but it will never have the flavor or texture of your childhood. The same was true with this book. It's still a good read. It's still well-written. The innovation of elephant characters, though, can't be invented twice, just as you can't make a first impression twice.
If you haven't read it, READ IT and enjoy! If you've read it before, revel in the memory and resist the temptation to re-read.
A gamut of emotions.
I have always been in love with elephants, especially since I was privileged to observe some of them in the wilds of South Africa. But this book lent a new dimension, that of emotions like great joy at their amazing capacity for love and hope, their highly developed ability to communicate with each other and even other species, then great sorrow at the tragedy of loosing their families, one by one, and revulsion at their justified fear of humans. This was a book that tugged at the heartstrings on almost every page.
It is a novel that reads like a very intimate biography.
Entranced by Elephants!
Heartbreakingly sad; incredibly creative. Anti-anthropomorphists beware. This story is told from the point of view of a family of African elephants, battling drought and the threat of slaughter by hindleggers (humans). The book contains a fantastic glossary of elephant vocabulary, and details their religion, memory, telepathic skills, social structure, and so much more. They are in search of a mystical white bone which will point them in the direction of The Safe Place, where "... entranced hindleggers... sit in mighty sliders (jeeps)...
