There are stories of wild tigers living in the camps of Jungle Indians, fading off when strangers approach, and stories of baboons joining in the games of Kaffir boys—games of a ferocity you would not risk with an Alsatian. All incredible stories. Yet Joy Adamson's story belongs with these. Living Free describes her continued friendship with the lioness, Elsa, while Elsa lived wild, had a wild mate and reared three cubs. During this period Joy Adamson kept a diary of Elsa's comings and ...

In a sense ["Forever Free"] is the saddest of the trio. It tells of Elsa's death and it is an intensely moving, and at times harrowing, story…. Elsa herself dominates only part of the latest book. Much of it is in fact devoted to the Adamsons' rescue of Elsa's three cubs….

The Spotted Sphinx is the record of a long association, one still very much alive at the end of the book…. A book by Joy Adamson grabs a reader and holds him. It is of course tremendously moving to see a member of our own species establish a relationship of trust and affection with an animal historically viewed as fearfully savage, an absolute threat to life and limb….

There have been many books written by people who have hand-reared wild animals, and then kept them around the house in a state of semi-domestication. But, interesting though these accounts often are, one gets the feeling that there is something lacking. The animal is neither truly domestic nor is it truly wild. Therefore, any observations on its behavior become automatically suspect. The ideal is, of course, to live on intimate terms with a truly wild animal, so that one can observe its behavior without dis...

An altogether admirable person, [Joy Adamson] has lived a rambunctious, large-scale, productive life, her own best example of one of the very few introspections to be found in ["The Searching Spirit"]: "… only one thing is certain—people get out of life exactly what they put into it." Having put more into it than most, Mrs. Adamson has left a lot of her life out of her book…. [The] best that can be said of Mrs. Adamson's narrative is that she reduces t...

To one who is familiar with Joy Adamson's tireless fieldwork, her disappointments as well as her achievements in international wildlife conservation, ["The Searching Spirit"] is far from complete. While the facts are there … there is all too little about Joy herself. Yet this autobiography should find an immediate place in the hearts of those who retain a love for Elsa and Pippa…. There is far too little about Joy and George since "Born Free"'s worldwi...

In "Living Free" Mrs. Adamson tells us the whole story of Elsa's mating, the birth of the cubs, their development and of Elsa's unfortunate death, and the story is a fascinating one, not only for anyone interested in animals but for the more serious student of zoology as well. Her style is pleasantly terse and factual, without any of the anthropomorphic frills that usually attend books of this sort. You get the impression that she is a brave and extraordinary person…. Mrs....

I found [Living Free] an absorbing story. First, because it gives the reader the genuine feeling of the African bush. (p. xxii) But that, fascinating though it is, is only a background for the story, only the stage on which the protagonists live out their parts. The main interest of the book lies in its account of the psychological development of Elsa and her family. (p. xxiii).

The Peoples of Kenya is much more than a fashion catalogue, and if you overlook the text you will be passing up quite an adventure. Although tribal ways in Kenya today are little more than a tourist floor show, a handful of people still manage to live as they did centuries before the invention of travelers' checks. Mrs. Adamson's word-pictures of their isolated communities—particularly in the cruelly magnificent, measureless crematorium of Kenya's northern region—are no le...

[The Searching Spirit: An Autobiography] is a unique story, told with the directness and simplicity of all [Joy Adamson's] writings: the story of a generous, creative and artistic person, with a great fund of affection for her fellow creatures, who has devoted her life to observing them as individuals in order to discover how they think, feel and behave, to recording the results with brush and pen, and to pleading their cause in the world at large. But this book is not a treatise, or in any sense a p...

Like other women who have fallen in love with Africa—Dame Margery Perham being a superb example—Joy Adamson is a woman of many talents. Unlike Dame Margery, however, she is not a born writer and … [The Searching Spirit] is pedestrian rather than inspired, and we learn very little about Mrs Adamson as a person…. Bereft of the lions,… this book is a little dull. This is not because Mrs Adamson's experiences were dull; they were not….

Adamson's rare perception and her superb gifts of story-telling are vividly evident [in Pippa's Challenge]. She has a passion for understanding "the fascination of what's difficult" (Yeats); the cheetah, reticent, graceful, and astonishingly beautiful, is a difficult and fascinating creature…. The challenge of Pippa and her cubs is to teach us something essential of ourselves—if we will learn. There is a useful comparison table of members of the cat family. H...