SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
The Hidden Life of Deer
Lessons from the Natural World

"In this slim and amiable book Ms. Thomas gathers a pile of small, not uninteresting observations about deer, and in doing so she subtly alters the way you look at them in a forest or from a window."
-- New York Times

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
The Old Way
A Story of the First People

From Publishers Weekly
In 1950, Thomas (The Hidden Life of Dogs), at 19, joined her civil engineer father, her ballerina mother (who would become a celebrated anthropologist) and her brother on a life-changing expedition into southwest Africa's Kalahari Desert to live among the Ju/wasi Bushmen. Less a rigorous anthropological study than a loving, nostalgic ode to a self-sustaining culture of hunter-gatherers, this book recounts their now extinct way of life. The Ju/wasi used ostrich eggs to hold more than a day's water supply to expand their foraging range, and burned dry grass to encourage the growth of green grass, thus attracting large antelopes and other prey. The Ju/wasi allowed polygamy and divorce, welcomed baby girls as much as baby boys and treated children with unfailing kindness, but practiced infanticide on children born to nursing mothers because, with their low-fat diet, they could produce enough milk for only one child. In recent decades, the Bushmen have been removed from their land and their way of life has been obliterated by modernity, racism, poverty, alcoholism and AIDS. Thomas offers readers a glimpse of how our prehistoric ancestors undoubtedly lived, worked, loved and played. Photos from the Marshall family album freeze the Ju/wasi in the happy 1950s.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Last year, while traveling through the Kalahari, I stopped for the night at a cluster of huts, encircled by cactus and low thorny scrub. The leader of the hamlet, a fine-boned San warrior, thanked me for making the journey to his world. He invited me inside, and we sat down in the darkness of his one-room home. When we were comfortable, I said it had long been my dream to see for myself the ancient ways of the San.
"You are too late," he replied. "Everything has changed."
"When did it change?"
The warrior pushed himself up on his stick and thought for a moment.
"A lifetime ago," he said.

The San people of the Kalahari, a vast desert region (120,000 square miles) in southwest Africa, have sometimes been ridiculed for their simplicity, their naiveté and their gentleness. (The tribe got the world's attention back in 1980 with the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy," in which an ordinary Coca-Cola bottle lands in one village, with catastrophic results.) . They possess a kind of refinement that is almost impossible to describe. Historically, their lives have never been cramped with consumer goods or supercharged by self-induced stress. Instead, they lived in a world that respected the elements above and the dry soil beneath. They walked lightly on the Earth.

Throughout the 20th century, the San were a beacon of light, shining back to an ancient time . . . that of our own ancestors. By learning about them, we were able to learn about ourselves. It sounds simple: You found a so-called primitive tribe, you studied it, and you concluded that what they are and what we were are the same. But it's not that simple at all. It takes an anthropologist blessed with extraordinary sensitivity and foresight to understand how the chain has worked. And it takes a greater one still to break it down into bite-sized chunks and feed it to laymen.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is one of the most important champions of the San "Bushmen." She has spent a lifetime gently alerting us to their cause -- and to the fact that we have not only polluted the planet but have wrecked the delicate balance of tribal Africa as well.

At the age of 19, Thomas traveled to Botswana with her parents and her brother and lived with the Ju/wasi tribe of Bushmen. Her father, Laurence, was a civil engineer, and her mother, Lorna, became a respected anthropologist, writing a seminal work on the !Kung San. Thomas turned her early feelings and experiences of the Kalahari into a book entitled The Harmless People (1959), a work that has not been out of print since.

Now, with a lifetime on which to reflect, she has published The Old Way, a work of impressive scholarship and, more important, a book that connects the dots linking us to the first stages of the human race. And how many dots there are! Thomas explains our human ancestry by citing the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins's illustration: "You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother's hand, who is holding her mother's hand. On and on goes your lineage, each of you holding the hand of your mother, until your line is three hundred miles long and goes back in time five million years, deep into the African rain forest, where the clasping hand is that of a chimpanzee."

Early in the book, Thomas reflects on how it felt to first stumble into the serene land of the Ju/wasi in the 1950s: "[It was] as if I had voyaged into the deep past through a time machine. I feel that I saw the Old Way, the way of life that shaped us, a way of life that now is gone." For her, the Ju/wasi reflected a time almost 150,000 years ago, when the "Old Rules" governed our species. We were a people in fear of lions, of sickness and of darkness, and we had yet to create the kind of agricultural, non-nomadic societies that frame our lives today.

The Old Way concludes with the disheartening truth that the Ju/wasi and other San groups now struggle to coexist in a world rocked and ravaged by homogeneous modernity -- a similar plight to Australian Aboriginal groups and other native peoples. Many San are living under a blanket of poverty, tormented by alcoholism and AIDS. They wear native clothing only when tourist cameras come out, and few can remember a relatively recent time when ostrich eggshells were used to carry water or when digging sticks were used to unearth prized tubers and roots.

The Kalahari desert continues to touch all who gaze upon it. But in a way, the land is not the same now that the fragile tapestry of humanity has been torn apart. When I finished reading Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's remarkable book, I found myself wishing I could step into the time machine as she did almost half a century ago and emerge into the real Kalahari, the world of our ancestors.
-- Reviewed by Tahir Shah
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
"In 1950, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ father, the retired president of Raytheon, together with his wife, a former English teacher, and their two teenage children went out to live among some of the last people in the world still living as nomadic hunter-gatherers. It would be a coming of age like no other, with stunning and unforeseen rewards for the field of Anthropology. Her mother, Lorne Marshall, would write The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, one of the great ethnographies of all time; her brother John made a series of films culminating (just before he died) in the epic Kalahari Family, chronicling the fate of the !Kung through early contacts and discovery of their remarkable way of life, to their tragic displacement from the lands that had sustained them for so many thousands of year. Elizabeth herself, an extraordinarily gifted writer went on to write a number of best-selling books. Now, half a century later, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas returns to those early experiences and re-examines what she learned from the people, places, animals and lifeways encountered in the Kalahari long ago. The result is a brilliantly conceived, wise and hauntingly vivid, portrait of the natural and social worlds inhabited by people living much as our earliest human ancestors must have. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ finest book to date, The Old Way, is a deeply felt, deeply observed masterpiece thattransforms the way we look at our own world." 
--Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection

"This is the owner's manual we need for humankind. The Old Way gives us critical insight into our past at a turning point in human history by one of the few people who has seen our kind living as we have lived for most of our species' existence. This will be one of the most important books of the millennium."
--Sy Montgomery, author of The Snake Scientist and The Man-Eating Tigers of Sundarbans 

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
The Harmless People

“A study of primitive people which, for beauty of...style and concept, would be hard to match.” —The New York Times Book Review

“The charm of this book is that the author can so truly convey the strangeness of the desert life in which we perceive human traits as familiar as our own....The Harmless People is a model of exposition: the style very simple and precise, perfectly suited to the neat, even fastidious activities of a people who must make their world out of next to nothing.” —The Atlantic

Praise for The Hidden Life of Dogs:

"Popular science of the highest order: revelatory, impeccably observed, and a joy to read. A four-woof salute to Thomas and a vigorous tail-wag to boot." —Kirkus Reviews

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Wild Discovery Guide to Your Cat
Understanding and Caring for the Tiger Within

From Library Journal
Relying on the expertise of veterinarians, animal behaviorists, and zoologists, these two titles explore the connection of domestic dogs and cats to their counterparts in the wild to help owners better understand their pets. Clearly explained are the similarities between big cats and domestic cats (for example, hunting, the senses, and territoriality) and the common traits of wolves and domestic dogs (e.g., pack mentality, canine teeth, and ears). Chapters on behavior discuss body language, vocal language, learning, and intelligence. The advice on nutrition, health problems, pregnancy, aging pets, and emergency care is straightforward and easy to understand. Dispersed throughout, informational boxes give concise advice and checklists on topics such as alternative vet care, defending territory, and bathing. Each volume has 300 wonderful full-color illustrations and photographs. More informative than The Tiger on Your Couch: What the Big Cats Can Teach You About Your House Cat (LJ 3/1/92), these volumes are entertaining as well as educational and would be useful in public and school libraries.AEva Lautemann, Georgia Perimeter Coll. Lib., Clarkston
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

BookPage, Reviewed by Rhoda Riddell, Ph.D., November 1999
Wild Discovery Guide to Your Cat: Understanding and Caring for the Tiger Within... and Wild Discovery Guide to Your Dog: Understanding and Caring for the Wolf Within... are the perfect gifts for pet lovers, but they offer something for everyone. The 300 superb photographs of dogs and cats in domestic life and in the wild provide visual delight for any age reader. For the student, the books offers clear, authoritative information for a school report. Would-be and new pet owners can learn everything they need to know in detailed instruction on how to select, care for, and understand dogs or cats....

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Wild Discovery Guide to Your Dog
Understanding and Caring for the Wolf Within

From Library Journal
Relying on the expertise of veterinarians, animal behaviorists, and zoologists, these two titles explore the connection of domestic dogs and cats to their counterparts in the wild to help owners better understand their pets. Clearly explained are the similarities between big cats and domestic cats (for example, hunting, the senses, and territoriality) and the common traits of wolves and domestic dogs (e.g., pack mentality, canine teeth, and ears). Chapters on behavior discuss body language, vocal language, learning, and intelligence. The advice on nutrition, health problems, pregnancy, aging pets, and emergency care is straightforward and easy to understand. Dispersed throughout, informational boxes give concise advice and checklists on topics such as alternative vet care, defending territory, and bathing. Each volume has 300 wonderful full-color illustrations and photographs. More informative than The Tiger on Your Couch: What the Big Cats Can Teach You About Your House Cat (LJ 3/1/92), these volumes are entertaining as well as educational and would be useful in public and school libraries.
-- AEva Lautemann, Georgia Perimeter Coll. Lib., Clarkston
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
The Social Lives of Dogs
The Grace of Canine Company

The New York Times Book Review, Caroline Knapp
...while critics from the hard sciences will still bristle at her sense of dog psychology, the rest of us will be delighted.

From Booklist
In this sequel to her surprising best-seller The Hidden Life of Dogs (1993), author and anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas shares the results of hundreds of hours spent observing her large menagerie of pets (dogs, cats, and parrots) and their various interactions with one another and with the humans in her household. Like the previous book, this one works both as a semi-anthropological study and as a moving biography of her pet family that also captures the complexities of animal relationships in a loving though straightforward and slightly eccentric manner. It may seem obsessive to those who are less than enchanted by our canine friends, but dog lovers will enjoy and empathize with Thomas' complete devotion to her pets and all animals and her humorous observations and sage advice on living with pets.
-- Kathleen Hughes
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved 

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Certain Poor Shepherds
A Christmas Tale

Marshall applies her knowledge of the animal world (The Secret Life of Dogs) and her fictional skills (Reindeer Moon) to a rich reimagining of the Nativity story. Her pilgrims are a wise goat named Ima and a huge warrior sheepdog , Lila. They are on the mountain guarding a herd of sheep when the star appears, and they immediately sense divinity in the air. Later, they see a flock of angels invisible to their master. Struck by inspiration, they follow the star to Bethlehem, where Lila witnesses the scene at the manger. Many other animals appear in the narrative -- camels, a cheetah, other dogs, a gazelle -- giving Marshall an opportunity to represent natural creatures interacting and cherishing their freedom, which to animals is a form of grace. After Ima and Lila experience several dangerous adventures, an uplifting ending, in which they are rewarded by an angel whom Ima had saved from an eagle, probably will elicit some happy tears. The deliberately simple but well-honed prose makes this story suitable for family reading, and Marshall's attribution of human thoughts and emotions to her animal characters should delight sentimentalists. But the epilogue, in which Marshall muses that "perhaps our hope of redemption lies in the fact that we are animals, not that we are people," will not make this book a favorite of fundamentalist Christians. Simultaneous audio.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
The Hidden Lives of Dogs