The wolf children
This is the story of Amala and Kamala, the two girls raised by a she-wolf in northeastern India, until they were reclaimed by humanity throught the efforts of a remarkable Anglican missionary who was also a native Indian, and his equally remarkable Indian wife, who struggled to run an orphanage in northeastern India, and whose diaries can now be found on the Internet. The book is a well researched and well written summary of the facts available to, and discovered by, the author in the 1970s, but could still be the best book on the subject for the general reader. He does not present all of his research in detail, but summarizes it all in narrative form, as he explains, to make it more readable. The last fourth of the book concerns how the story came to the attention of the world. There was always a lot of scientific concern about the truth of it, and the author clearly understands why: it is simply an nearly incredible story. Nevertheless, through an apparently thorough and careful investigation, he managed to satisfy his own skeptical mind that it was true. What we will never know, and can only imagine, is the exact nature of the life of the two girls with the wolves -- and inevitably as wolves themselves, insofar as such a life was possible for human children.
[by] Charles Macleanill, map, ports. ; 23 cmIncludes index
