Forever Free Elsa's Pride by Joy Adamson
Signed by Joy Adamson
Girst Edition 1962
This SIGNED Copy is Rare Highly Sought after
Hardcover
Forever Free completes the story of Elsa and her cubs and is illustrated with even finer and more varied photographs than the previous books.
It opens with Elsa and her cubs under sentence of removal from the reserve in which they live and with George Adamson away re-connoitring a new home for them. Meanwhile Joy spends an idyllic month with the family until Elsa falls ill. The account of how Elsa died a few days later in George's tent is deeply moving. Soon after her death an emergency developed when the fierce lioness of Living Free drove the cubs from the camp and, near starvation, they began to raid the huts of local Africans in search of goats. During a raid they were shot at with bows and arrows and Jespah was hit.
Joy Adamson is best known for her conservation efforts associated with Elsa the Lioness. In 1956, George Adamson, in the course of his job as game warden of the Northern Frontier District in Kenya, shot and killed a lioness as she charged him and another warden. George later realized the lioness was just
protecting her cubs, which were found nearby in a rocky crevice. Taking them home, Joy and George found it difficult to care for all the cubs' needs. The two largest cubs, named "Big One" and "Lustica", were passed on to be cared for by a zoo in Rotterdam, and the smallest, "Elsa", was raised by the couple.
Using her own notes and George's journals, Joy wrote Born Free to tell the lion's tale. She submitted it to a number of publishers before it was bought by Harvill Press, part of HarperCollins. 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. The success of the book was due to both the story of Elsa and the dozens of photographs of her. Readers had pictures of many of the events of Elsa's life leading up to her release. Subsequent books were also heavily illustrated. Born Free received largely favorable reviews from critics. Adamson worked closely with publishers to promote the book, which contributed to the Adamsons' new-found international celebrity. She spent the rest of her life raising money for wildlife, thanks to the popularity of Born Free. The book was followed by Living Free, which is about Elsa as a mother to her cubs, and Forever Free, which tells of the release of the cubs Jespah, Gopa and Little Elsa. Adamson shared book proceeds with various conservation projects.
