Soul of a Lion

One Woman's Quest to Rescue Africa's Wildlife Refugees
by Barbara Bennett

Not surprising, looking at the cover and title of this book, I thought it was about lions. It's not. There are some lions in it, but they're not really the focus. The woman who wrote it traveled from North Carolina to Namibia, to visit a wildlife sanctuary and work there as a volunteer during her stay. She was so taken with the experience she began writing about it. A little into the book you realize it's not a personal story of her volunteer work, either. She decided to tell the story of the founder- her sometimes lonely and tough childhood, her extended family, what inspired her to start the sanctuary, how the place is run, how volunteers were incorporated into it and so on. While the anecdotes about the rescued baboons (many of them), lions, cheetahs, leopards, antelopes, hyenas, meerkats and other animals -including one young giraffe- are nice to read, more and more as the book goes on it's about people. It's about the situation of wildlife in Namibia, it's about how the San people have been marginalized, it's about local efforts to provide health care and education. And unfortunately, I found the writing style uninteresting. I kept going because of the subject matter- I did want to learn more about these things- and it was an interesting comparison to both George Adamson's work with lions more than twenty years earlier and Peter Stark's description of living with Bushmen. The animals in this sanctuary were released if possible, but the majority of them either were too habituated to people (had been pets) or needed constant care (for example, a lion with an autoimmune deficiency disease, a baboon that suffered from epilepsy and Down syndrome, wild dogs missing a leg from traps, etc). I would have liked to know more details about how the animals were prepared for release, but the text here just mentions them being dropped off in the bush, or let to wander until eventually they didn't return. It was a struggle to maintain interest through the end of this book, mostly due to the poor writing. I much prefer her blog version, (which includes many lovely photographs).

Rating: 2/5               303 pages, 2010