PW editors read more than 50 proposals from seminar attendees. Their favorite was C. James Mahoney's From Elephants to Mice: Animals That Have Touched My Soul. Reviews director Louisa Ermelino explained how the staff chose Mahoney's work: “C. James Mahoney's entry stood out immediately. There was a wonderful authority and backstory—a vet for 40 years, a scientist and researcher who has an epiphany about the human characteristics of animals and writes about it without sentimentality. His submission about treating a rogue elephant in Tamil Nadu was not only engaging and polished but passed the ultimate test: where the reader wants to know... and then what happened?”
C. James Mahoney has been a veterinarian for more than 40 years. He's worked with dogs, chimpanzees, cows, horses, elephants, mice and a host of other creatures, and has learned some amazing lessons about animals and humans along the way. He has stories to share and knows animal books sell (yes, he's read Marley and Me). But it wasn't a commercial bestseller that inspired Mahoney, 68, to write. Rather, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals got him thinking “about the personal experiences that I've had with individual animals,” Mahoney said. “You have a bond, and it's remarkable.” So he wrote From Elephants to Mice: Animals That Have Touched My Soul.
Mahoney's career has focused on research, and, as he writes in his book proposal, he eventually became “consumed by the dilemma of using animals in research: My heart was dead set against it, my mind not able to see any alternative.... [T]he greatest cruelty we committed on animals in the research laboratory was not recognizing their individuality.” From Elephants to Mice is a collection of vignettes about some of the animals Mahoney has known in his career. There's Loki, a South Indian elephant regarded as a killer, who has been brutally treated and misunderstood by his captors. There's also a chimp named Spike Mulligan, a dog named Pupsi, monkeys Finnegan and Erin, and three wild mice. “Each story is like a little book,” Mahoney explained.
The author, who was born in Ireland and came to the U.S. in 1972, published an earlier work, Saving Molly: A Research Veterinarian's Choices, about a runt puppy from Jamaica, with Algonquin in 1998. He's hoping to find an agent and publisher for From Elephants to Mice and is looking forward to working with someone in the industry on his idea, and mainly wants “someone to just tell me, 'This is great' ” or, as the animal doctor puts it, “ 'You're barking up the wrong tree.' ”
