From an early age, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has been enthralled with the natural world, and she shares her keen observations in her memoir Dreaming of Lions. Her parents, particularly her father, wanted Thomas to experience life fully, and the biggest influence on her life was when her parents took the family to live in the Kalahari Basin in Africa in 1951.
She carefully intertwines memories of her African experiences as her family followed the ways of the local Bushmen, or Ju/wasi, who lived near various waterholes in the Kalahari, with her adult life in the U.S. with her husband and children, their own journeys to Africa and their interactions with the Dodoth tribes. On these later trips, she encountered elephants and lions, hostility for being a woman and the violence of Idi Amin's regime.
Thomas deliberately doesn't follow a timeline; she tells her life's story by subject and themes rather than chronologically, which gives readers perspective on how this woman's creative mind works. From microscopic waterbears living in a drop of swamp water to the leopards that prowled next to her as she slept near a waterhole to the cougar that killed a doe in her yard, Thomas shares her awe of nature with readers, providing insight into the ways of animals that is obtained only after years of careful scrutiny. Candid revelations about her own struggles with alcohol and the medical traumas endured by her family round out this undeniably powerful narrative of life that is reminiscent of The Flame Trees of Thika and Out of Africa. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer