Somewhere East of Eden

From the author of Half Way Down an African Moon comes an evocative account of random journeys undertaken in Africa over the last thirty years. Written at a time when the natural world everywhere is being heedlessly plundered and exploited as never before, these recollections – impassioned, comic, ironic and critical by turn – are a reminder that in everything but multi-national corporate cupidity, the damage may well be irreparable. Whether drifting in a fishing boat among lurking pods of unpredictable hippos down the Zambezi, tracing the demise of the hapless Dodo in Mauritius, trekking for lowland gorillas in the rainforests of south-east Nigeria in the company of a wryly erudite local parks ranger, or pondering the Stone Age mind-set of wealthy trophy hunters, the author's exhilaration for wildlife and nature glows through the prism of a gradually darkening lens. The current state of our natural world may look bleak but giving up on it, as he reminds us, is not an...