| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating and Compelling,
This review is from: Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa (Hardcover)
What a remarkable woman and a remarkable book. It is amazing that the name Joan Root is not part of the lexicon of environmental activists and extraordinary women like Dian Fossey (who Joan introduced to her beloved gorillas) and Jane Goodall. At its core, the story of Joan Root is a love story. Author Mark Seal superbly recounts how Joan's love for Alan and heartbreak when he left transformed into a deep and consuming love of Lake Naivasha and her fierce defense of the land she called home. A compelling read.
60 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Think of it as Wildebeests in the Mist,
By
This review is from: Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa (Hardcover)
Three years ago, armed men invaded the Kenyan lakeside home of a 69-year-old woman and shot her dead.Poachers did it, probably (though no one's been convicted). For decades, Joan Root had been working hard to protect the wildlife around Lake Naivasha. But that meant taking away livelihood of some Kenyan men. She had tried to help them, and they had betrayed her. It was to become a pattern. In 1960, still a shy schoolgirl, Joan Thorpe had met Alan Root, a daredevil who would never fully grow up. He'd saunter right up to hippos and puff adders for one of his nature documentaries, get himself mangled or bitten, then walk up to them again. He was flamboyant for the cameras; she enabled his flamboyance. (They introduced Dian Fossey to those mountain gorillas.) He'd chase after lions stalking an impala, and Joan would be in the background, making sure they had enough petrol for the Land Rover. Alan Root's devil-may-care attitude would lead him to dump Joan for another woman, evidently the Queen of All Possessive Bitches, and then yet another woman. One who could give him babies. Joan devoted herself to babies of another kind: the aardvarks and wildebeests that pranced across her lakeside estate. She went from being Alan's willing "assistant" to realizing that, throughout their marriage, she had been "too dutiful." You can see why Julia Roberts has optioned the movie rights to this tragedy: self-effacing woman, betrayed by husband and Africans both, gradually self-empowered and fiercely determined to preserve Kenya's beauty right up until she's murdered. It's a riveting story, but one that Mark Seal bobbles. Some of the problem is that Seal approaches Joan Root through the perspective of Alan. Relying on diary entries and letters written decades before by a woman he never knew, Seal doesn't illuminate Joan reticent personality much at all: It's all Alan this and Alan that. Afterwards, you can sense Alan's creeping rationalizations. He'd needed so much more than Joan could give him, you see. But she had given everything she had, first to Alan, then to the poachers she was trying to rehabilitate. And what did they do in return? They killed her for it.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A compelling story written elegantly,
This review is from: Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa (Hardcover)
To be honest, I'm normally more of a fiction guy but I picked up this book on a friend's recommendation and now I'm finding it hard to put down. It's an engrossing narrative, researched meticulously, written simply, yet layered with remarkable detail. Well done!
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
|
|
