Born Free (1960)

I love animals, and it would be a dream come true to bond with a wild animal like Joy and her husband George did. It was an easy read, and there were lots of wonderful photos. What a fabulous lion Elsa was - she learned to live with other wild lions, but at the same time, she was gentle and always careful around her human caretakers, who she seemed to love just as much as they loved her. ( )

I read this book at the beach back when I was 8 or so. I remember my babysitter telling her friend I couldnt be reading such a big book for my age, that I must be pretending.

Well, I read a lot of it . . . I loved the lions. And the movie was awesome to me as a kid. ( )

This is the book the film was based upon, the story of Elsa the lioness, hand raised by a Senior Game Warden and his wife, Joy Adamson, and later released into the wild. This would be rated five stars except that I really try to be stingy with those. The book didn't make me cry, laugh-out-loud or change my thinking, and Adamson, while she writes well and fluently, doesn't have the impressive, lyrical prose of Beryl Markham and Isak Dinesen, two other European women who wrote celebrated memoirs about their time in Kenya.

But what this book does offer is what a friend of mine called a "lost art:" The ability to write about an animal without treacly sentimentality but rather with sharp and insightful observations that make their personality evident (and in this case lovable) without a narcissistic focus on the writer and without an evident heavy-handed political agenda. Not that it hasn't had such a political effect. A Foreword by George Page quoting Faith McNulty claimed Born Free "may have done for the cause of wildlife what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for the antislavery crusade." Not only did the book gain support for the protection of habitat and endangered animals, but the Adamsons helped pioneer the technique of reintroducing animals raised in captivity back into the wild. Not that Elsa could ever be called a captive lion. That's what made her happy ending possible. She was never confined, never treated with brutality in an attempt to dominate. Even after successfully released into the wild, when the Adamsons came to visit her she'd recognize and greet them with affection. As Joy Adamson put it, their relationship continued "to be one of absolute equality quite different from that between a dog and his master." This is a short book you can read in a few hours and filled with a multitude of photographs of Elsa. It was a pleasure to read and I highly recommend it--especially for lovers of animals and nature. ( )

Heartwarming account of the raising of an orphaned lion cub and her return to the wild in 1950s Kenya illustrated with a plethora of contemporary photographs. Predicated on a belief that humans and wild animals are peers, this book was an important milestone in raising awareness of animal conservation. ( )

Born free was the first real novel that I had ever read on my own, and I fell in love with the story. It was a heart touching sequence of real life events that followed Elsa through being an orphaned cub, all the way up to her becoming wild and raising her own litter of cubs. Elsa is the most loveable character there is, she is funny, playful, whitty and smart. This is also why the book becomes so sad for near the end when George and Joy are trying to teach her how to become a wild lion and therefore have to make her fend for herself for weeks and becuase you feel so emotionally attched to Elsa by this stage, you can't help but feel sorry for her and what she's going through.
Joy Adamson uses definitions from her experiences with Elsa to describe certain feelings or situations at the time. This is very effective in that sometimes the reader won't know a certain species of animal that is being talked about and so Joy knowing that will describe the animals physical and behavioural features. The language used throughout the book is very formal but also very casual which helps the reader understand and also connect to the loveable Elsa.
Although a very short story with not many events throughout it apart from Elsa being raised as a house tammed cat and then being taught how to become a wild lion, Joy manages to capture the reader's attention, not by action or drama, but by moments from her time with Elsa that were happy, funny and left the reader feeling good. It was these moments of the book that I absolutely fell in love with, I didn't need action or drama, I wanted a feel good book with a feel good ending and that is exactly what this book has done for me. ( )