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Book Review of Modoc : The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived

Modoc : The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived
LMM avatar reviewed on + 155 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 6


I had some real issues with this book. The writing is sophmoric and the story, although putatively true, is so embellished that it reads as a fable. There are so many factual errors (such as Xray machines in rural India in the 1910's and traveling southeast from Calcutta to reach the Ganges Delta) that I almost abandoned it. Modoc is consistently described as having significant tusks, yet the elephant(s) in the photos are tuskless. The author also never clearly sets the time of the story, which makes the events confusing and hard to place in history. Supposedly Bram & Modoc were born in 1897 and died in the 1970s.