Elephant Company was a book for a local book club. To be blunt, it's blisteringly racist. As a wildlife journalist, Coke was probably just searching around for a new, heartwarming animal-human friendship story for her next book when she chose James Williams. What she in no way accounted for is that she is an American Westerner writing about a former colonized SW Asian country. She only refers to Myanmar by its colonized name, Burma. One could argue that "Burma" is in period for Williams, but Coke isn't writing in period, with Williams' limits. She demotes Myanmar culture's gods, the nats, to "sprites." The Naga people are "notorious head-hunters," with zero authorial acknowledgement that it's British propaganda. The Myanmar people are props and unnamed helpers in her narrative about Williams, who she breathlessly narrates with starry eyes. Elephant Company honestly felt like a historical fiction novelization of Williams' journals. It's definitely not a nonfiction investigation and intelligent, nuanced accounting of a historical event. Coke ignores the socio-political context of Williams' journey, what it means that White people came into a jungle, extracted cultural knowledge at gunpoint, and ordered an indigenous tribe to call them "master."

I was shocked that a book published in 2014 was so pro-colonialization, with how much Coke didn't care about Mynamer and its people. I don't recommend this book to anyone. If you want a pleasant story about White people flailing around in Myanmar, try Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan.