Next to the tiger, there has been more literature on the elephant than on the any other wild animal of the Asian continent. Past writing has been on the art of hunting, capture and trading of elephants. In recent times, the ecology of the animal has been dealt with in detail. A Trunk Full of Tales is a different kind of narration. The lifelong affinity that the author has had with the animal is obvious. It does make the account subjective, but that does not detract one whit from the readability and value of the book. There are stories of hunting of elephants which may cause abhorrence to a segment of people, but that was how things were till the recent past and the author has had the courage to write about them.   The numerous accounts of elephants, both captive and wild, are in fact also the life-story of the auth«. The two are irrevocably interwoven. They are described with panache and with a lively sense of humour. The book talks about individual elephants, including rogues, in the first person as it were. The 'elephant people' described, such as Lalji, come across as people totally dedicated to the elephant and with fascinating idiosyncrasies, and this charac-teristic applies to the author as well.   The book is divided into three sections -Elephants and Their Ways; Rogues and Marauders, and Managing Elephants in the Wild. There is an account of Gabbar Singh and the other aggressive elephants of the Dalma Sanctuary; of how a tamed tusker Kishan Lal killed his mahout and to avoid punishment escaped~into the forest but came back four years later to his own pilkhana or stable. Of how Harjit the elephant would knock out the hut with helpless people in it to eat the grain and bananas inside, without touching the unfortunate people cringing in the damaged hut. The author liakes the interesting observation that the 'capture, captivity and training of elephants in India over the millennia have resulted in a bonding between man and the beast, which has facilitated its conservation in Asia unlike in Mrica, where there is no such bond. The author also observes that it is not necessary to inflict cruelty after the capture of elephants to facilitate their training and that those elephants which have been trained without undue harshness have turned out to be the best domesticated animals. This refutes a widely ...