The one lesson they seem to have absorbed from the Asian mahouts, was the idea that young elephants have to be brutally “broken”, through sleep and food deprivation, along with physical abuse. The level of ignorance and brutality shown by "keepers" & "trainers" is shocking. It describes the capture of Far Stream and her sister in Sri Lanka and their shipment, training and the working lives of circus elephants in the USA during this period.
It is a well told and important story, but very upsetting. The author has incorporated the real experiences of other circus elephants of the period, into his narrative. It is based on the true story of Topsy, a circus elephant who became dangerous through abuse and ill treatment, and was executed at Coney Island in 1903. This is a meticulously researched and well told story of Circus Elephants in the USA in the late 19th & early 20th centuries. Samuel Hawley Goodreads Author & member of ALL ABOUT ANIMALS Reading group) "Bad Elephant Far Stream" Hawley returns to nonfiction to tell the epic story of how the world's first feature film came to be made. In his latest book, The Fight That Started the Movies. Hawley has also written fiction, starting with the novel Bad Elephant Far Stream and continuing with the thriller Homeowner With a Gun, now in development as a feature film. His nonfiction books include The Imjin War, about Japan's 16th-century invasion of Korea and attempted conquest of China, first published in 2005 and reissued in 2014 (Chinese translation forthcoming) Speed Duel: The Inside Story of the Land Speed Record in the Sixties, now being developed by Company Pictures into a TV miniseries and I Just Ran: Percy Williams, World's Fastest Human, named one of the five "Best Sports Books of 2011" by the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). Samuel Hawley has BA and MA degrees in history from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and worked in East Asia as a teacher for two decades before becoming a full-time writer.
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