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Queen of Shaba : The Story of an African Leopard
Sm Quarto, , PP.332,
180 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1980
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134 people want to read
About the author
Joy Adamson
46 books87 followersJoy Adamson (born Friederike Victoria Gessner) was a naturalist, artist, and author best known for her book, Born Free, which describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. Born Free was printed in several languages, and made into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.
Born to Victor and Traute Gessner in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic) and was the 2nd of 3 girls. Her father was a wealthy architect. After the divorce of her parents, Joy went to live with her grandmother. In her autobiography The Searching Spirit, Adamson wrote about her grandmother, saying, "It is to her I owe anything that may be good in me."
Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine, but did not take her finals in medicine, instead chosing to get married. She married 3 times in the span of ten years. Her husbands were Viktor von Klarwill (Ziebel) 1902-1985, (Jewish Austrian), the botanist Peter Bally (divorced in 1942), who gave her the nickname "Joy", and lastly game warden George Adamson. Viktor sent her to Africa, Bally influenced her painting and drawing of the people and the plant life of Africa. 600 of her paintings now belong to the National Museum of Kenya. The Colonial Government of Kenya commissioned her to paint portraits of members of 22 tribes whose culture was vanishing.
It was during her marriage to George Adamson that she lived in tent camps in Kenya and first met Elsa, the topic of her famous book Born Free. Adamson is best known for her conservation efforts associated with Elsa the Lioness. They decided to set her free rather than send her to a zoo, and spent many months training her to hunt and survive on her own. They were successful in the end, and Elsa became the first lioness successfully released back into the wild, the first to have contact after release, and the first known to have cubs. The Adamsons kept their distance from the cubs, getting close enough only to photograph them. After the book was written and published in 1960, it became a bestseller, spending 13 weeks at the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and nearly a year on the chart overall.
After Elsa died, George and Joy Adamson separated and were not together after 1971. On 3 January 1980, in Shaba National Reserve in Kenya, Joy Adamson's body was discovered by her assistant, Peter Morson (sometimes reported as Pieter Mawson). He mistakenly assumed she had been killed by a lion, and this was what was initially reported by the media. Police investigation found Adamson's wounds were too sharp and bloodless to have been caused by an animal, and concluded she had been murdered. Paul Nakware Ekai, a discharged laborer formerly employed by Adamson, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to imprisonment at President Daniel arap Moi's pleasure. Joy's widower, George Adamson, was murdered 9 years later, in 1989, near his camp in Kora National by poachers.
Born to Victor and Traute Gessner in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic) and was the 2nd of 3 girls. Her father was a wealthy architect. After the divorce of her parents, Joy went to live with her grandmother. In her autobiography The Searching Spirit, Adamson wrote about her grandmother, saying, "It is to her I owe anything that may be good in me."
Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine, but did not take her finals in medicine, instead chosing to get married. She married 3 times in the span of ten years. Her husbands were Viktor von Klarwill (Ziebel) 1902-1985, (Jewish Austrian), the botanist Peter Bally (divorced in 1942), who gave her the nickname "Joy", and lastly game warden George Adamson. Viktor sent her to Africa, Bally influenced her painting and drawing of the people and the plant life of Africa. 600 of her paintings now belong to the National Museum of Kenya. The Colonial Government of Kenya commissioned her to paint portraits of members of 22 tribes whose culture was vanishing.
It was during her marriage to George Adamson that she lived in tent camps in Kenya and first met Elsa, the topic of her famous book Born Free. Adamson is best known for her conservation efforts associated with Elsa the Lioness. They decided to set her free rather than send her to a zoo, and spent many months training her to hunt and survive on her own. They were successful in the end, and Elsa became the first lioness successfully released back into the wild, the first to have contact after release, and the first known to have cubs. The Adamsons kept their distance from the cubs, getting close enough only to photograph them. After the book was written and published in 1960, it became a bestseller, spending 13 weeks at the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and nearly a year on the chart overall.
After Elsa died, George and Joy Adamson separated and were not together after 1971. On 3 January 1980, in Shaba National Reserve in Kenya, Joy Adamson's body was discovered by her assistant, Peter Morson (sometimes reported as Pieter Mawson). He mistakenly assumed she had been killed by a lion, and this was what was initially reported by the media. Police investigation found Adamson's wounds were too sharp and bloodless to have been caused by an animal, and concluded she had been murdered. Paul Nakware Ekai, a discharged laborer formerly employed by Adamson, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to imprisonment at President Daniel arap Moi's pleasure. Joy's widower, George Adamson, was murdered 9 years later, in 1989, near his camp in Kora National by poachers.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 31, 2017
I always enjoy Joy Adamson's books. The original hardbacks have a feel and atmosphere about them which I really love. They aren't exciting books. They aren't fast paced. In some ways it often feels like nothing much happens and the narrative could be summed up in just a few words. But as I say, there is an atmosphere about the books which love and it is nice, occasionally, to just leisurely read Adamson's books and immerse yourself in that world for a little while.
Possibly because this was the last of her books it felt a little drier than some of the others. It felt very much like she was just going through a brief diary and trying to concoct a narrative out of the brief summary of each day's events. And (I say in a theorizing way), because she had never gone into much detail in her diary at the time, she was limited in what material she had to go on and ended up confining herself mainly to dry facts of the days events without ever taking a step back and look at things from a wider perspective or with hindsight. The resulting picture is a bit of a confused one. One day you get the impression that Penny the leopard seems to be fully independent and capable of looking after herself, another day she seems to be entirely dependent on Joy for food. There seems to be little in the way of analysis and assessment. Joy asks questions along the way - and asked them repeatedly as the same questions strike her on different days - but she never goes back and answers them based on the increased knowledge and experience of the ensuing months.
You don't really get a sense of progress or struggle. Everything just seems to happen as a matter of course. Where Elsa had to be trained to be independent and live in the wild, it feels almost like Penny just grew up that way and developed naturally in her own way without the need for Joy to do much at all.
You get mixed messages too - as in all her books - where Joy talks as though her greatest aim is to get animals back into their natural life in the wild and always speaks as though it is with great reluctance that she interferes with their lives in any way, and warns strongly of the dire consequences of any kind of interference which could permanently condemn them to a life of captivity. And yet her actions seem to suggest quite the contrary, and she seems too willing to interfere and unwilling and unable to let them go when they are capable of living independently. She continues to interfere with them daily, checking up on them and feeding them even when it seems entirely unnecessary as far as the welfare of the animal is concerned. Possibly if she did step back and give the bigger picture then we would understand that her interference was necessary, but as it is she often records finding Penny with a full belly and not hungry which all indicates that she doesn't require the food which Joy keeps forcing upon her. She never leaves Penny to just get on with her life.
The ending of the book, the Publisher's Postscript, left me a bit confused. I was disappointed that there was next to nothing about Joy's death in it. Perhaps there had been so much about it in the news that it was taken for granted that everyone knew about it already? No cause of death was mentioned. I couldn't understand the timescale either. Was Joy's writing her final chapter immediately after the events of it had happened, or was she writing it up several months after the event? The Publisher mentioned that she had intended to write a sequel about Penny's cubs, so was there already something to write about, or was Joy just intending to write about future events which were yet to happen? An extract of Joy's writings concerning a fire in the camp was included in the Publisher's Postscript which was very interesting. But if this happened during the timescale of the events of this books, why did Joy not include it in the narrative herself, and if she purposely excluded it, what other interesting things were left out? But if this was an event which happened after the time period covered by this volume, what other extant writings were there which could have gone into publication of a posthumous volume?
If you've read the Born Free trilogy, or the books about Pippa the Cheetah, then this volume is just more of the same sort of thing and you will know what to expect. If you've never read those then I wouldn't really advise this book as being a good place to start. Born Free is probably the place to start with Joy Adamson's books.
Possibly because this was the last of her books it felt a little drier than some of the others. It felt very much like she was just going through a brief diary and trying to concoct a narrative out of the brief summary of each day's events. And (I say in a theorizing way), because she had never gone into much detail in her diary at the time, she was limited in what material she had to go on and ended up confining herself mainly to dry facts of the days events without ever taking a step back and look at things from a wider perspective or with hindsight. The resulting picture is a bit of a confused one. One day you get the impression that Penny the leopard seems to be fully independent and capable of looking after herself, another day she seems to be entirely dependent on Joy for food. There seems to be little in the way of analysis and assessment. Joy asks questions along the way - and asked them repeatedly as the same questions strike her on different days - but she never goes back and answers them based on the increased knowledge and experience of the ensuing months.
You don't really get a sense of progress or struggle. Everything just seems to happen as a matter of course. Where Elsa had to be trained to be independent and live in the wild, it feels almost like Penny just grew up that way and developed naturally in her own way without the need for Joy to do much at all.
You get mixed messages too - as in all her books - where Joy talks as though her greatest aim is to get animals back into their natural life in the wild and always speaks as though it is with great reluctance that she interferes with their lives in any way, and warns strongly of the dire consequences of any kind of interference which could permanently condemn them to a life of captivity. And yet her actions seem to suggest quite the contrary, and she seems too willing to interfere and unwilling and unable to let them go when they are capable of living independently. She continues to interfere with them daily, checking up on them and feeding them even when it seems entirely unnecessary as far as the welfare of the animal is concerned. Possibly if she did step back and give the bigger picture then we would understand that her interference was necessary, but as it is she often records finding Penny with a full belly and not hungry which all indicates that she doesn't require the food which Joy keeps forcing upon her. She never leaves Penny to just get on with her life.
The ending of the book, the Publisher's Postscript, left me a bit confused. I was disappointed that there was next to nothing about Joy's death in it. Perhaps there had been so much about it in the news that it was taken for granted that everyone knew about it already? No cause of death was mentioned. I couldn't understand the timescale either. Was Joy's writing her final chapter immediately after the events of it had happened, or was she writing it up several months after the event? The Publisher mentioned that she had intended to write a sequel about Penny's cubs, so was there already something to write about, or was Joy just intending to write about future events which were yet to happen? An extract of Joy's writings concerning a fire in the camp was included in the Publisher's Postscript which was very interesting. But if this happened during the timescale of the events of this books, why did Joy not include it in the narrative herself, and if she purposely excluded it, what other interesting things were left out? But if this was an event which happened after the time period covered by this volume, what other extant writings were there which could have gone into publication of a posthumous volume?
If you've read the Born Free trilogy, or the books about Pippa the Cheetah, then this volume is just more of the same sort of thing and you will know what to expect. If you've never read those then I wouldn't really advise this book as being a good place to start. Born Free is probably the place to start with Joy Adamson's books.
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April 9, 2020Joy Adamson (born Friederike Victoria Gessner) was a naturalist, artist, and author best known for her book, Born Free, which describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. Born Free was printed in several languages, and made into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art. Born to Victor and Traute Gessner in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic) and was the 2nd of 3 girls. Her father was a wealthy architect. After the divorce, Joy went to live with her grandmother. In her autobiography The Searching Spirit, Adamson wrote about her grandmother, saying, "It is to her I owe anything that may be good in me." Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine, but did not take her finals in medicine, instead chosing to get married. She married 3 times in the span of ten years. Her husbands were Viktor von Klarwill (Ziebel) 1902-1985, (Jewish Austrian), the botanist Peter Bally (divorced in 1942), who gave her the nickname "Joy", and lastly game warden George Adamson. Viktor sent her to Africa, Bally influenced her painting and drawing of the people and the plant life of Africa. 600 of her paintings now belong to the National Museum of Kenya. The Colonial Government of Kenya commissioned her to paint portraits of members of 22 tribes whose culture was vanishing. It was during her marriage to George Adamson that she lived in tent camps in Kenya and first met Elsa, the topic of her famous book Born Free. Adamson is best known for her conservation efforts associated with Elsa the Lioness. They decided to set her free rather than send her to a zoo, and spent many months training her to hunt and survive on her own. They were successful in the end, and Elsa became the first lioness successfully released back into the wild, the first to have contact after release, and the first known to have cubs. The Adamsons kept their distance from the cubs, getting close enough only to photograph them. After the book was written and published in 1960, it became a bestseller, spending 13 weeks at the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and nearly a year on the chart overall. After Elsa died, George and Joy Adamson separated and were not together after 1971. On 3 January 1980, in Shaba National Reserve in Kenya, Joy Adamson's body was discovered by her assistant, Peter Morson (sometimes reported as Pieter Mawson). He mistakenly assumed she had been killed by a lion, and this was what was initially reported by the media. Police investigation found Adamson's wounds were too sharp and bloodless to have been caused by an animal, and concluded she had been murdered. Paul Nakware Ekai, a discharged laborer formerly employed by Adamson, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to imprisonment at President Daniel arap Moi's pleasure. Joy's widower, George Adamson, was murdered 9 years later, in 1989, near his camp in Kora National by poachers
December 6, 2019
Toward the end of her life Joy Adamson, best known as the human pet of Elsa the lion, bonded with a leopard released at the Shaba preserve. This is the story of her experience with the leopard, who remained friendly but extremely dangerous--she didn't seem to recognize Adamson in different-looking clothes--for the rest of their lives; the leopard apparently outlived Adamson.
This is another book that I owned, but not for long.
This is another book that I owned, but not for long.
July 11, 2018
Klasika môjho detstva
February 4, 2023
Thoroughly enjoyed the book- the African jungle life, animals, leopard Shaba and the author, whose life came into an abrupt end in the middle of her diary.
January 21, 2025
This was her last book. She wrote about the first few years of a leopard's life. Quite thrilling! I enjoy her straight forward approach to all life has to give.
March 31, 2017
This was Joy's final book. It reads a lot like your reading from her daily journal. The story is quite interesting as they work to release the leopard back into the wild to independence. After reading the book, search YouTube for the "home movies" one of the assistants made while there. I think there was an interview as well. I'll leave it to you to seek them out.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews