When in 1975 Joyce Poole arrived at Kenya's Amboseli National Park to begin work as a student researcher, it was both a homecoming and a revelation. As the child of a Peace Corps director, she had been raised in Africa and had come to love its freedom and the challenges it offered of a life on the edgequalities she greatly missed back in America. The opportunity not only to return to the continent but to join Cynthia Moss's prestigious elephant study at Amboseli was a godsend for a young woman who had by now recognized that in her heart, she was unalterably an African.But it was through her work with elephants over the following fifteen years - through the profound questions she had to confront daily about the interactions between humans and animals - that Joyce Poole truly came to know herself. Coming of Age with Elephants is her remarkable memoir of this period, an account of the intellectual, political, and social struggles she faced in her path to maturity as a woman and as a scientist, and an extraordinarily vivid record of the lives and habits of earth's most extraordinary mammals.As she conducts groundbreaking research in elephant sexual cycles and communication, Poole becomes acquainted with almost 800 individual elephants, from the playfully affectionate Vladimir to the crafty and terrifying Bad Bull, whose harassment of the biologist culminates in a frantic pursuit across the plains. With the passing seasons she witnesses the elephants' births and deaths, their games and their hardships, and discovers the intricacies of their social structures, the depths of their intelligence, and their uncanny empathy for both their own species and for the humans they trust.Yet even as Poole's work begins to establish her as a recognized elephant specialist, she faces a series of challenges that test her personal and professional mettle: the sexism she encounters in the field; her yearning for a relationship and a child, which proves to be a considerably difficult effort for a scientist in the field; a brutal attack during a walking trip in the idyllic Ngong Hills; and, finally, the devastation of Kenya's elephant populations during the worst ravages of ivory poaching in the mid-1980s. Poole herself eventually plays a role in saving the elephants when Richard Leakey appoints her Director of Elephant Conservation and Management for the Kenya Wildlife Service in 1990. Although successful in curtailing the slaughter, she is then ironically forced to balance her own concern for the animals with her administrative duties when the region's elephants begin to damage property and even take human lives. Read Less