Disclaimer: I have visited and given money to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and so should you. Daphne Sheldrick has made a major contribution to wildlife conservation and her work is to be applauded. Her memoir is a somewhat conventional "Out of Africa" story: hardy pioneers, gauzy sunsets, magnificent vistas, and lots of lots of stories about the animals who have come her way. She was obviously deeply in love with David, and yet he strangely remains a somewhat remote character. He is defined by his deeds, as he and other rangers carve out Kenya's wildlife parks and reserves and heroically try to stop the decimation of the wildlife caused by our insatiable demand for trinkets made from ivory and potions made from rhino horn.

It's hard to criticize a book for what it does NOT say, but, having worked for over ten years with another Kenyan conservationist, Wangari Maathai, I have a very different perspective on the history of Kenya that Dame Daphne covers. (If you haven't read Maathai's memoir, Unbowed, I would recommend it.) What struck me most noticeably in Dame Daphne's story was the almost complete absence of black Kenyans. Nearly all of the main characters are white and of British stock. The Mau Mau rebellion is treated as an affront against white settlers. Daphne's daughter studies in South Africa, and some of her relatives retire there to live, but there is only one reference to Apartheid. We get no sense of the conservation movement in the context of Kenya as an independent country. We do not hear from black Kenyan political figures or the press or, indeed, from the poachers. We never learn the biographies of the black attendants who look after and even live with the animals. Tribes are mentioned in connection with their hunting practices, but these Africans are rarely individualized. It's almost as if they're simply background for the white people's attempts to save the animals.

None of this, I'm sure, is done deliberately. Dame Daphne speaks Swahili and has lived in Africa all her life. Many of the white people she worked with were born in Africa. Yet she considers herself British first and foremost and she appears to share the bitterness of the settlers in southern Africa who felt sold out by British government as it retreated from Empire in the fifties and sixties. The animals she has spent her life rescuing have personalities and biographies, and her life with them is fondly and deeply remembered. It's a pity that all those black Africans who helped her all those years couldn't have been afforded the same attention.