"The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary follows Morel, a Frenchman who survives the Holocaust - a survival he credits to ima... (more)
"The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary follows Morel, a Frenchman who survives the Holocaust - a survival he credits to imagining elephants roaming the wilderness. Once free, he travels to French Equatorial Africa with the aim of saving his beloved elephants from being hunted and killed for meat and ivory. Realizing his more conventional tactics are not eliciting a response, however, he turns militant, and the story takes a dark turn. This novel examines the corrosive force of human desensitization, and it is one of the first classic ecological novels of our time." -- (less)