Customer Reviews

Wildflower - an Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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!

The book was a page turner even though I was acquainted with the story of the Roots from reading about them in various magazine articles. Joan Root's struggles to preserve her lake made me think quite a bit of The Cherry Orchard and the book raises questions, sometimes unanswerable, about the causes and solutions of African economic, political and ecological problems. While reading of the description of the crowded slums where the Kenyan flower workers lived it did make me question why a woman living alone needed 80 some acres, and some of her neighbors even more. Why proper sewage can't be provided to a community when so much money is coming in from the flower industry. Why a worker on one of the farms would never be able to afford a bouquet of roses. The author of the book in his description of the growth of the Kenyan flower industry and its effect on the ecology of the lake area where Mrs. Root lived describes a scene straight out of Dr. Seuss's book about the character who "spoke for the trees." It was possibly not the author's intention to raise these questions, and they are not popular issues. On the most recent list of countries in danger of becoming failed states Kenya has moved a little closer to the top of the list. The author of Wildflowers make you aware of the problems of sustainability and income raising industry. It would seem that some difficult and unpopular measures possibly need to be taken to reverse the slide into "failed state" danger. This book would be of interest to people who have an interest in adventure tales and to those who are just "green". I probably won't buy another rose from a florist and will just add them to the list of the diamonds that I can't afford, fast food hamburgers, veal, caged chickens, pork chops, bottled water etc. etc. etc.

Just by chance, I picked this book up at the library along with The Bolter. At the heart of each book is a woman who made her home in Kenya. But beyond that, the two women couldn't be more different.

Joan Root was a painfully shy girl who devoted her life first to making her parents' photo safari business a success and then to making her husband Alan Root into a famous wildlife filmmaker. She was the go-to gal for everything from drawing up itineraries to managing staff to preparing meals for film crews.

Too bad her husband turned out to be a heartless philanderer. He eventually tired of this tireless worker and swanned off with a more colorful model. Deeply wounded, Joan eventually found her way as a wildlife conservationist and ecological activist, working to save the environment of Lake Naivasha, where she lived. She lost her life for her efforts.

Mr. Seal places his story amongst the other evocative stories that have arisen out of this mythological place: Out of Africa , White Mischief, The Murder of Lord Erroll, and The Bolter, to name a few. Unlike Idina Sackville's dissolute life as recounted in The Bolter, Joan Root's life story is well worth telling, even though hers is an achingly sad one.

From the outset we know Joan Root, the shy, eccentric British conservationist and Oscar nominated film-maker will, by the end of the book, be murdered in cold blood in her home on the shores of Lake Naivasha in Kenya's Great Rift Valley.
In between is a most remarkable story about a most remarkable woman. It is also the story of Africa's fast disappearing wilderness.
At the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 it was announced that Julia Roberts would play Root in a movie telling the story of her extraordinary life and her brutal death, allegedly a murder carried out in retaliation for her conservation efforts.
The producers said they got the idea for the film after reading a lengthy article in Vanity Fair magazine which writer Mark Seal has since expanded into the book Wildflower. Roberts apparently read the same article and was equally moved by the story of Root's efforts to try to preserve Africa's threatened wildlife.
When the newly married Roots first settle in Lake Naivasha in the mid 1960s it is an unspoiled paradise. Home to masses of exotic animals from gazelles to crested cranes, giraffes to pythons, at night an army of 1,200 hippos rise from the waters to feed. The blue lake house is their headquarters where the adventurous couple come for research, post-production and rest between safaris as they carved out stellar careers pioneering nature documentaries for the BBC.
After a painful divorce, the book tells how Joan Root's 36-hectare home, 88 kilometres west of the capital Nairobi, changes from Garden of Eden to hell on earth as she confronts severe environmental pressures after huge flower farms bought up much of the lakeshore, using the water to irrigate the blooms that are flown out in export to Europe. Slums followed the flowers and violence and poverty threaten to destroy one of the most magical places on earth. One suspects it is already too late.

A wonderfully written story of a most fascinating and wonderful woman who dovoted herself to the preservation of wildlife and land. Without knowing this person, I grew to admire and respect her as I read of her life. How ironic for her life to end as it did as she worked tirelessly against poaching and harming the wildlife she was so passionate about. The author succeeded in portraying to the reader the unique individual she truly was. She sought neither fame nor fortune, but simply the satisfaction she received in the causes she so passionately pursued. I highly recommended this book to any reader as it is simply too interesting to pass up.

This is an incredible book. For its brevity, it managed to squeeze in and illuminate complicated personal, environmental, and political issues. Joan Root, the subject of the book, was a fascinating and admirable woman and it's clear this book was a labor of love from an author who first learned about her when writing an article about her horrible death for Vanity Fair. This book made me want to know more about Joan, and her husband Alan, and see the incredible films they made together. It's too bad it took her death for the spotlight to be focused on her struggle to preserve the beauty of Africa and to care for its wildlife. She was a truly compassionate and unique woman. As for drawbacks, I wish the book had gone into more detail about Joan's relationship with the animals and the land that took up a large part of her life, since that was so close to her heart. She rehabilitated wildlife and considered her property a haven. The book feels somewhat unbalanced because it focuses so much on Joan's personal life and dramatic interaction and conflicts with her husband (later ex), Alan, and David Chege, two important men in her life, and doesn't explore as fully her interaction with the wildlife and the land she cared so much for. This, to me, would have made this well-written book even better!

A great read. I was surprised how the White Kenyans live in that area of Africa. It was a very risky life-style. I will look at wildlife films in a different way from now on.

What a brave and caring woman Joan was!

Wildflower by Mark Seal is a must read for anyone interested in Africa, Animals, and learning the story of an amazing lady, Joan Root whose dedication to her country and the animals that lived on her lake, her fierce strength and endurance,and her love for people and animals made a HUGE difference for so many lives. I had never heard of this incredible woman before I was told to read Wildflower. I was mesmerized with each page of the book. We are So fortunate that Joan kept such meticulous notes and that Mark took the challenge to write this very powerful book. You will NOT be sorry that you purchased this book....it will definitely change your life like it did mine.