Lady and the Panda (Croke)

Book Reviews
The Lady and the Panda is primarily a personal story. And it conveys the unusual blend of imperiousness, caprice and affection with which Ms. Harkness approached her under-taking. At a time when adult pandas were considered too difficult and perpetually hungry to transport alive, she fastened on the idea of finding and nurturing a tiny one. (A newborn panda has the weight of a stick of butter.) She would make a surrogate child out of Su-Lin, the rare panda to leave China as anything better than a pelt.... The Lady and the Panda winds up stranger than fiction but no less poignant.
The New York Times

A real-life Indiana Jones adventure…[that] seems to grab hold of people and refuse to let go … Croke lived her story and it shows.
Chicago Tribune

An ingenious story.... Croke is smart and skillful enough to give us a romantic heroine who can hang on to her louche personality and remain believable.
Newsday

Insightful,a beautifully written work....[deals] with bigger issues: loss, fate, love, and the way animals emotionally can touch human beings.
USA Today

(Starred review.) During the Great Depression, inexpensive entertainment could be had at any city zoo. The exploits of the utterly macho men who bagged the beasts also made good adventure-film fodder. Yet one of the most famous animals ever brought to America—the giant panda—was captured by a woman, Ruth Harkness. Vicki Constantine Croke, the "Animal Beat" columnist for the Boston Globe, became fascinated by bohemian socialite Harkness, who was left alone and in difficult financial straits in 1936 after her husband died trying to bring a giant panda back from China. Instead of mourning, Harkness took on the mission. Arriving in Hong Kong with "a whiskey soda in one hand and a Chesterfield in the other," she soon found herself up against ruthless competitors, bandits, foul weather and warfare. Luckily, she was accompanied by the handsome and capable Quentin Young, her Chinese guide and eventual lover. This gripping book retraces their steps through the isolated and rugged wilderness where pandas hide, and then back to America, where the strange bears took the West by storm. Despite her remarkable journey, Harkness was derided and ignored by male adventurers. In dusting off this exciting tale, Constantine Croke (The Modern Ark: Zoos Past, Present and Future) returns Harkness to her rightful place in the top rank of zoological explorers..
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) It was once a story that every school kid knew. Ruth Harkness, a dress-designing socialite, following a trip laid out by her dead husband, captured the first giant panda to ever be seen in the West.... Harkness was a mass of contrasts: sophisticated city dweller and earthy lover of remote places, hard-drinking libertine, and devoted nurturer of infant pandas (yes, she went back and got more), and Croke evokes her character in an evenhanded style that makes her three-dimensional.
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