The elephant is enormous, but it is not as gigantic as the history of human exploitation.
★★☆☆☆
📖 Overview
The consciousness of the late elephant expert Dr. Damira Khismatullina gets awakened for a very important job: teaching de-extinct mammoths how to survive and thrive in their natural environment. Nobody suspects that she’ll use this new chance to bring forth their (and her) revenge.
🚀 Strengths
The topics covered in this book surely take the spotlight.
The first big the author tackles is poaching. Ray Nayler did his research on how this illegal practice is still blossoming, and it surely shows. He casts an unforgiving light on what happens, how, and why. I can’t hide from you that some scenes should have a trigger warning for more sensitive people.
The other important topic is extinction and de-extinction, both of animals and humans, with all the related issue of ethics and how such a program should be financed.
📉 Weaknesses
Even though the topics were really relevant, I felt that only the one about poaching was developed deeply. I know it’s a short book, but I would have given more information and opinions on the other aspects of this book too.
Plus, I am still left with a bit of an aftertaste due to the author’s choice: I am amazed how he manages to talk about animal exploitations, of how animals themselves must feel when you take away the only thing that belongs to them, their bodies, to profit and egotism… and one leaves the bigger topic of vegetarianism, of better yet – veganism, aside.
🎨 Style
I can’t say I was a fan of it. It’s really dry and essential, and it failed to convey emotions in a more effective way. It succeeded in bringing the story along without wasting much words, a plus since it’s such a short book.
I feel like some passages were also really confusing, and all in all I couldn’t really click with the way Ray Nayler decided to portray this story.
🔖 Quotes
“You kidding me? The Mind Bank is for geniuses and heroes. Experts in their field – like you. Our National Intellectual Wealth, I think they are calling it. Not people who sit around in labs making fruit flies glow in the dark. Nobody’s going to be looking to bring us back from the dead.”
“It’s brought up a lot of memories, coming here.”
“Yes – but not my memories. I felt, in Moscow, like I was disturbing a grave. It’s better out here, at least.”
“Why is that?”
“Because they were urban people. Muscovites who would never have set foot in a place like this.
When I was a stupid little kid with a bunch of fantasies about where I came from, me head filled with onion domes and church bells and sleigh rides through the cedars, I once asked my grandfather
if he had seen a bear. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘The only bears I ever saw wore
expensive Savile Row tailored suits and ties that cost more than your life.
But they were much deadlier than anything you would find in a forest.'”
“God, I wish I had met that man.”
“I’m glad he’s gone, Ant. He would have been furious with you for bringing me here. Absolutely furious.”
“Listen – there are two Russian proverbs you should know.” Dr. Aslanov held up his hand, and counted them off on thumb and index finger. “One: ‘The sober man’s secret is the drunkard speech.’ Two: ‘Confide a secret to a mute man, and he will speak.’“
“I saw the rare earth metals in every terminal in every hand in Hong Kong, London, New York. I saw everything that was torn from its natural environment to become a material, to become anonymous, denatured. I saw all of that. But for some reason – perhaps because I grew up here, among the elephants, what caught my eye, always, was ivory. It stood out, white and gleaming among the other objects in every display – like maggots in a wound. And I understood: I know what it is like to be from an extracting zone. What is like to grow up in the place where the taking begins. But an elephant knows what it is like to be an extraction zone. That is their history. The elephant is enormous, but it is not as gigantic as the history of human exploitation.”
There was something to the Nenets stories about how the creature were curses – about how they spread sickness and death. He thought of the bulls, of the sound like a sob that the younger one has made when it sank to the earth. It was not the animal, but the act that was cursed. The act of killing an animal in order to take something that was part of them – and turn it into something you merely sold. It was the act of digging in and disturbing the earth that was cursed. The act of tearing the banks from streams to gouge out Ice Age corpses. Svyatoslav had seen the way the streams afterwards were thick with slit and dying fish. The traces of greed swirling in the current.
Inky Lighthouse 
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