BOOK REVIEW / Paperbacks: Survivor's Song: Life and Death in the African Wilderness - Delia and Mark Owens: HarperCollins, pounds 7.99

The country is Zambia and the subject is ivory. The Owens, having falling foul of the authorities in Botswana with their expose of wildlife destruction in Cry of the Kalahari, move north, where they discover an elephants' graveyard, the result of the tusk-poaching that is endemic to the area. So they take up a new struggle against the big-time ivory bandits, in which their lives are threatened and their marriage nearly falls apart. But in the end they are triumphant, and in the valley where they operated, the slaughter of elephants was reduced from a thousand a year to 12. The Owens's tendency to see everything as either black or white makes for regrettable simplifications, but it's still a good read.