A Training School for Elephants
History and travelogue combine wonderfully in this tale of colonial plunder and hubris .... Luminous ... Reflective, watchful, calm, Roberts is such a vivid travel writer that you forget what a brilliant historian she is. She has the water-diviner’s gift for stories in unlikely places. And then, through research in archives as well as on the ground, for uncovering sparky details that bring the story to life ... Her narrative [has] a glow of sympathetic charm ... It is Robert’s thoughtful reactions to these events in places where they happened, sometimes under the very same trees, that give her book its power ... [An] ugly story is made bearable by her warm, beautiful writing, and equally warm human encounters.
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[Roberts] has an eye for the encounter but struggles to connect the parallel worlds of her narrative (past and present, Europe and Africa) ... Ms. Roberts’s pachydermal pursuit is a wild-goose chase with elements of the shaggy-dog story. She never shows why the quartet of elephants might reveal how 'European imperialism had unfolded on the African continent' ... There are also more howlers here than in the forest at twilight.
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Roberts...writes eloquently about the landscape at times, and A Training School for Elephants is an accessible primer on African colonial history and Leopold’s depredations ... Her contemporary journey through Tanzania is more troubling ... Roberts errs by looking for the past in the present and failing to fully engage with that present on its own terms ... Roberts has intriguing encounters—she’s good about arranging meetings with various tribal chiefs, for instance, but she gets a pithy quote or two and then she’s gone. What does it mean to be a chief in modern Tanzania? How does private and political life ebb and flow in this country 60-some years after independence? She doesn’t say, never staying long enough in any one community to learn what life really looks like for its people today.
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