Bruce Bryden's true stories about the life of a bushveld conservationist draws on 27 years in the service of the Kruger National Park. It makes for a gripping read, abounding with encounters with elephant, lion, buffalo, leopard and rhino, whether darting for research, managing culling operations by helicopter or stalking on foot. In the best tradition of bushveld stories, there is a great deal of shooting, and a fair amount of running away; there are meetings with extraordinary characters...

When I was 10, I was taken from my quiet, safe corner of old Europe and deposited into an exotic new world. Africa, at once breathtaking and soul-destroying, from the snow-capped mountains and teeming game plains of Kenya and Tanzania to the haunted hunger-stalked dustbowls of Ethiopia and the Sudan – the hideous and the magnificent have always gone hand in hand there.Nobody who has once set foot on the soil of Africa will ever be quite free of it again. When I first went there, I ...

German-born artist Vic Guhrs came to Africa at the age of twenty-two to fulfil his boyhood dream of a life in wild places among wild animals. He lived for twenty-five years in an isolated bush camp in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia and knows that, despite its paradoxes and its mysteries, he can never leave Africa. The trouble with Africa, he says, is that once it is in your blood, like malaria, it is almost impossible to get rid of. And the trouble with Africa is also the trouble with those ...

Max du Preez has one hell of a story to tell. In his career as a renegade reporter, he’s survived three dismissals, seven libel suits, thirteen criminal cases, four aeroplane crashes, a bombing, two assassination attempts and was a regular on right-wing hit lists. He was in Soweto on 16 June 1976, witnessed the debauched parties of apartheid cabinet ministers, and stepped over dead bodies in a bombed Angolan village. He looked into apartheid killer Dirk Coetzee’s eyes and published his sto...

Jenna Butler draws on her own experiences of her grandmother's disappearance into senile dementia to reassemble a sensual world in longpoem form that positively crackles with imagery and rhythm. Identities and memories flow and flicker as she strings together fragments of narrative into stories that comprise one woman's life. It entwines her disappearing life with that of the persona of the woman's granddaughter through a choreographed confusion of identities: of she's and I's. Few poets c...

Tired of tragic stories, Chris Harvie sets out to see the positive side of the ‘Dark Continent’ and to enjoy its life and laughter. Do Not Take This Road to El-Karama is the entertaining account of an epic road trip that takes him from his home outside the Kruger National Park to the banks of the Nile in Uganda – and back again. In his haphazard and somewhat eccentric travels, Harvie encounters missionaries and mechanics, locals and ex-pats, rascals and rogues. Delving into his own mixed B...

When she was fifteen, Tammie Matson went on safari with her father to Zimbabwe - and it changed her forever. Back in Australia she turned her life upside down to build her future in Africa.Returning to the safari camps - this time as a worker - she out-ran a charging lioness, played with a cheetah, stumbled across poachers and watched with amazement as a witchdoctor struck fear into his victims' hearts. This was the adventure she was looking for and deciding to study zoology gave h...

When an elephant saved Sally Henderson's life in Botswana, it was to change her irrevocably. A passion to conserve this majestic species was ignited, and in 1990 she left Australia to join an elephant research project in the wilds of Zimbabwe.What follows is a remarkable journey into the world of Africa's elephants, and a deeply personal memoir of one woman's awakening and the choices she makes to follow her calling.Sally paints a rare and unforgettable portrait of a Herd a...

It's the middle of the night in the Namibian desert when zoologist Tammie Matson wakes with a start to find two elephants standing beside her tiny tent. She makes a promise: "If you just let me survive tonight I will give up Africa. I'll give it all up. Just don't let them stand on me."It's not a promise she will easily keep. At 29, Tammie has spent nearly half her life in Africa, her first love, working as a conservationist. But as her 30s approach, Tammie is conscious of...

He's operated on whales, administered antibiotics to performing lions, barely escaped alive after treating unpredictable chimps, cared for every imaginable household pet - and most of all, enjoyed every minute of it. Well-known veterinarian, cartoonist, writer, and one of the world's leading authorities on horse behavior - Dr. Robert M. Miller shares his memoirs of a life filled with all the joys and tragic moments that caring for, and loving, animals brings. Now the vet known for his hila...

Join a top safari guide for hair-raising and hilarious tales of South Africa, animals and close escapes.It shouldn't be fun to be charged by an animal that could easily crush you, but top safari guide Peter Allison gets an odd thrill every time an elephant charges his beaten-up Jeep or a peckish crocodile looks at him sideways. By now you'd think the bestselling author of DON'T RUN, Whatever You Do would know how to keep out of trouble. But from avoiding territorial hippos...

The astonishing story of the soldiers, conservationists, and ordinary Iraqis who united to save the animals of the Baghdad ZooWhen the Iraq war began, conservationist Lawrence Anthony could think of only one thing: the fate of the Baghdad Zoo, caught in the crossfire at the heart of the city. Once Anthony entered Iraq he discovered that hostilities and uncontrolled looting had devastated the zoo and its animals. Working with members of the zoo staff and a few compa...