KENYA: The Woman Who Loved Lions

Author Joy Adamson lived free amid her animals

Only one thing is certain," wrote Joy Adamson in her autobiography, published just last spring. "People get out of life exactly what they put into it." Joy Adamson embraced East Africa and shared her embrace with the world. During more than four decades in Kenya, she sketched and painted the region's luxuriant flowers and plants, captured portraits of its tribespeople in their fast-vanishing traditional costumes, and—most of all—made the great cats of Africa her friends. No lion on earth ever became more famous than Elsa, the cub that Adamson reared from infancy...