Elephants in the Hourglass: A Journey of Reckoning and Hope Along the Himalaya

by Kim Frank

Overview

Delving deep into an intricate web of unlikely heroes, power struggles, and living legends, Elephants in the Hourglass takes listeners on an extraordinary journey of discovery. In her nonfiction debut, Kim Frank blends personal narrative, vivid descriptions, and meticulous research as she illuminates the ways we seek to survive on our rapidly changing planet.

Kim is a female explorer who found her life completely changed as she was drawn deeper and deeper into the plight of the remarkable Asian elephant. For Kim, once she learned about the intense, multi-faceted, but little-known conflict between humans and elephants in North India, she was unable to rest until she had learned more and told this story to the outside world. This was a place and topic totally unknown to her. Up until that point, Kim was an ordinary mom and emerging writer. After a fraught divorce, she felt a need to recapture her own voice and expand her world, and so she set out to the Himalaya with the goal of telling a story worthy of National Geographic.

What Kim experienced would change her life. Filled with unforgettable characters and encounters with one of the most sensitive, intelligent, and awe-inspiring creatures on the planet, Elephants in the Hourglass will inspire listeners to pursue their goals and be a force for change in unexpected places.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798228682542
Publisher:	Tantor
Publication date:	10/07/2025
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kim Frank is an award-winning writer and photographer whose work has been published in the Explorers Journal, Sidetracked, Oceanographic, Earth Island Journal, American Literary Review, SVPN (where she also served as editor), and more. Projects include the books Born to Ice with National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen and Amaze with SeaLegacy founder Cristina Mittermeier, and writing/directing the documentary Where the Forest Roars. She is a fellow of The Explorers Club and the Royal Geographical Society, with a Master of Fine Arts from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a Master of Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice.

Editorial Reviews

Insightful and deeply moving, Kim Frank’s exploration of the elephant-human conflict for the Asian elephants is a rare blend of empathy and ecological awareness. I couldn’t put this book down! It’s a timely reminder that conservation is about finding balance, and this story offers hope for how we might achieve it.

Rannva Joermundsson

A journey is often a test of patience and fortitude. To travel along with Kim Frank and share her experience finding wild elephants is mesmerizing.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Kim Frank has a keen eye and a keener heart. This book is her gift to these majestic creatures. And to us as well.

Steve Searles and Chris Erskine

Kim’s constant dedication to bringing this story to light with sensitivity and through a deeply personal lens shows true tenacity. Her journey is one of love and compassion, driven by the desire to protect these magnificent beings through deeper understanding.

Kartiki Gonsalves

Nuanced, wise, and enthralling, Elephants in the Hourglass is Kim Frank’s extraordinary memoir about her adventures investigating the plight of Asian elephants in northeastern India—inquiries that run alongside accounts of personal healing, letting go of control, humorous self-doubts, and Frank’s struggle to balance her calling as a writer abroad with her love for her daughters in Idaho. Sharp observations fill this powerful book that explains that Asian elephants, including those in the eastern Himalayas, are moving toward extinction at an exponential rate. Elephants in the Hourglass is a captivating environmental memoir that addresses global issues related to technology, development, culture change, and gender roles in addition to examining the decline of an endangered species.

Foreword Reviews

Kim Frank has an incredible gift for writing in a way that immerses you completely, making you feel as though you’ve stepped into the book and are standing right beside her. In today’s post-truth world, the search for perspectives on truth is more important than ever. Kim captures this beautifully in Elephants in the Hourglass, taking you with her on every step of the journey.

Alexandra Climent

To travel along with Kim Frank and share her experience finding wild elephants is mesmerizing.”

New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

2024-10-12
An American woman’s encounters with Asian elephants in their native habitat.

Picking her way out of a failed marriage, Frank takes inventory of “the woman I had once been—confident, curious, vivacious, a leader,” and determines that she was no more: “Dead or lost, I was not yet sure.” A chance conversation about the plight of Asian elephants, whose habitat is rapidly disappearing “in a war over diminishing resources of food and water,” leads Frank to team up with a photographer and pitch travel stories about the elephants and their protectors. The photographer, a well-published pro, is frequently impatient with Frank, who is clearly willing to do the work but is often a burden all the same: the photographer, at one point, says that she needs to be able to jump on the back of a motorcycle at a moment’s notice and head out for the story, while Frank is less spontaneous. Frank’s narrative has its moments, but too often her focus is not on the elephants but on herself: “I close my eyes on the drive, imagining myself as a war reporter, a woman who would put herself at risk to document important news to show the Western world all they do not know.” For much of the narrative she is not that woman, and the important news is merely self-important. As she learns to navigate the landscape and comes to know some of the elephants’ protectors, the narrative picks up a bit, but Frank is still inclined both to navel-gazing and to treacly New Age formulas (“I am being led by an unseen force. And all is interconnected, just as I felt one with the oxygen, oceans, and grains of sand in that moment by the sea”), and the elephants seem an afterthought.

Readers interested in Asian elephants will find more useful information elsewhere.

Kirkus Reviews