Books: Elephants in the Raw

KOMOON!—CAPTURING THE CHAD ELEPHANT (219 pp.)—Heinrich Oberjohann —Pantheon ($3).

The elephant in captivity, says Heinrich Oberjohann, is a pious fraud—a nine-foot canting hypocrite that gives the human public what it wants while privately laughing up its trunk at the hairless little apes. Only in the wilds of Asia and, better still, of Africa, can elephant nature be seen in the raw; and then usually only by other elephants, for the largest of land animals is also one of the more elusive.

Heinrich Oberjohann is a bring-'em-back-alive man, and he probably knows as much about elephants in the raw as anybody living. In...