Kamadejo wrote:The Africa Diaries
An Illustrated Memoir of Life in the Bush
- Dereck & Beverly Joubert
- ISBN 079227962X
Award-winning natural history filmmakers Dereck and Beverly Joubert have lived in the wilds of Africa for twenty years, fiercely dedicated to understanding and protecting the majestic animals surrounding them. The Africa Diaries is a powerful first-person account of their extraordinary work as wildlife researchers and conservationists. The Jouberts document their odyssey through passages culled from the pages of their field journals and over 130 stunning full-color photographs, giving readers a rare insight into their extraordinary lives in the African bush.
- Angus, Maisie & Travers McNeice
- ISBN 978-0752848051
(German: Wir Löwen Kinder / ISBN 3785720866)
Emily (16), Travers (10), Angus (9) and Oakley (1) lived in an idyllic 300-year-old cottage in the Cotswolds. They attended the local school, watched telly and did all the things English middle-class children do. Then, in 1995, their mother, a biologist, seized the opportunity to study lions in Botswana and, in the space of 3 months, changed the family's lives forever. Within 24 hours of landing in Gaborone they were travelling to their new home at Maun in the Okavando Delta, one of the most beautiful wildernesses on earth. Just weeks after arriving, the children had made home in an old mission house full of stray dogs. Then there were the little things to attend to like getting fresh water, buying food, digging a toilet and finding out what creepy crawlies would kill you and which would not. Their classroom was an open hut and their back garden the Okavango Delta. Their free days were spent in a Land Rover tracking prides of lions across hundreds of miles of bush. The Lion Children is an extraordinary life-enhancing story about the joys of childhood and living in an environment as different as it can be. But above all it is about the lions who we get to know through the eyes of the children themselves.
(German: Unter Menschenfressern / ISBN 3894052295)
Caputo is a superb yarn-spinner with a love of adventure and a penchant for philosophizing. A best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, memoirist, and journalist, he's really been around--"at last count, I've lived, worked, traveled, and fought and covered wars in 48 countries on 4 continents"--so it's no surprise to find that Caputo's latest compelling work of nonfiction chronicles a quest on foreign ground. The inspiration for Caputo's African sojourn is found in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the final resting place for the two infamous, maneless, man-eating male lions of Tsavo, an inhospitable and scrubby coastal region in East Africa. These beasts "attained mythic status" by killing and eating 135 railway laborers in 1898, and their cunning descendants continue to take humans as prey and to intrigue scientists who want to know why some lions hunt human beings, why most male lions have manes, and why many male Tsavo lions do not. Caputo relishes hair-raising tales of man-eaters and explicates various theories about them, while entertainingly chronicling his experiences as part of a photography and research safari in Kenya's wildlife reserve. Not only does he excel at evoking the beauty of his surroundings and describing his own sometimes harrowing encounters with wildlife, he also reflects cogently on the consequences of our precipitous decimation of the wild. It turns out that there's nothing all that mysterious about the Tsavo lions: they simply hunt to live. It's our unnecessarily violent species that remains obdurately enigmatic.
Kamadejo wrote:Dangerous Beauty: Life and Death in Africa: True Stories from a Safari Guide
- Mark Ross
- ISBN 978-0786866724
(German: Afrika- Das letzte Abenteuer, die Geschichte eines Safariführers / ISBN 3596155967)
Ross was born and raised in the U.S. but longed for and dreamed of Africa. After college he moved to Kenya and became a full-time safari guide, leading tourists to the best views of the resident wildlife and teaching them about the ecology of East Africa. This idyllic life changed dramatically in March 1999, when Rwandan rebels kidnapped him and four safari clients, along with other tourists, in Uganda. By the end of the day, two of his clients and six others had been murdered and the rest traumatized and brutalized. The horror of this experience totally changed Ross. The events of March 1999 form the beginning and the end of his narrative, bracketing a moving account of a life spent doing what one loves most. Ross tells of how he came to Africa, what life is like on an extended safari, and of the numerous animals he and his clients observed. The immediacy of this memoir will linger long after it is read.
Kamadejo wrote:Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants
- Katy Payne
- ISBN 978-0140285963
(German: Stiller Donner, die geheime Sprache der Elefanten / ISBN 3894051272)
Naturalist and bioacoustics researcher Katy Payne stood near an elephant cage at a zoo and felt a strange "throb and flutter" in the air. When she later realized that the feeling was very like that caused by the lowest notes of a pipe organ, she embarked on a journey of scientific and personal discovery that took her to Africa to study how the huge mammals communicate. For years, she lived close to the elephants she loved, getting to know individuals and describing their long-distance infrasound "conversations." After her fifth such expedition, one third of the elephant population she was studying was killed in a planned cull by the Zimbabwean government. Whether or not you accept Payne's hypothesis that elephants are extraordinarily intelligent and capable of communicating with each other and with other species (including humans), you will find her descriptions of the animals compelling and compassionate. Her grief at the loss of her elephant friends is palpable, and she uses it to utmost effect in decrying not only the ivory trade, but the way in which humans have decided to live on the planet.
Kamadejo wrote:Echo of the Elephants: Story of an Elephant Family
- Cynthia Moss / Martyn Colbeck
- ISBN 978-0563360940
(German: Das Jahr der Elefanten, Tagebuch einer afrikanischen Elefantenfamilie / ISBN 3894051051)
The elephants of Amboseli park in southern Kenya have been the subject of a unique study for many years. This book, which covers a period of 18 months, is written in the form of a journal which documents the saga of a particular family of elephants whose lives have become central to that of their observer, Cynthia Moss. Far from taking the formal and conventional approach of scientist or researcher, Cynthia adopts a more personal view, so that with her we enter the fascinating and often dramatic events surrounding these most remarkable and complex of animals. Echo, the matriarch of the herd, gives birth to Ely whose tragic start in life and miraculous recovery will touch the reader with its emotional intensity. Ely becomes one of the central figures of the book as we watch his day to day growth and development. In the 1990s human beings are at last beginning to be aware of how much we have to learn from other animals in their natural habitat. There is increasing worldwide concern for the safety and protection of these magnificent yet highly vulnerable creatures. Cynthia Moss's testament and Martyn Colbeck's superb photographs are both a tribute to the enduring appeal of elephants and a reminder of their vulnerability in the modern world.
(German: Meine sanften Riesen / ISBN 9783442373949)
Author Sally Henderson had her life saved by an Elephant in Botswana which fuelled a passion to conserve her hephalump pals and join an elephant research project in Zimbabwe.
On over 100 Safaris Gary K. Clarke has canoed the Zambezi River, camped on the floor of the Ngorongoro Crater, slept under the stars in the Kalahari desert, and traversed the Great Rift Valley. In this book he writes about many of his adventures and misadventures in Africa. This book is a must for adventurers and animal lovers.
