DRAWN FROM THE PLAINS. Life in the Wilds of Southern Africa. Lynne Tinley

1979. Hard cover with dust cover; 191 pages. Good condition. Tightly bound. Fox spot in the back. Bottom edges of hard cover show shelf usage. Under 1kg.

Lynne Tinley and her husband Ken who is one of the leading new-wave ecologists in Africa, have devoted many years to a race against time. On the Etosha Pan, in the isolated and spectacular wildernesses of South West Africa (Namibia), and later on the other side of the continent at Gorongosa in Mozambique, they set out to gather information which was urgently needed if the natural ecological balances of these and other African parks and reserves were to be preserved.

Living in the wilderness they discovered a wealth of wonders. Sketching this far-off world of risk and hardship in words and pictures Lynee conveys images of great beauty, controversial biology, anthropology and veld humour. Morover she provides a vivid and entertaining account of how to raise a boy and girl in the bush. Together the family survives terrorist raids, charging hippo, elephant and lion, rabid dog bites, baboon spiders, gaboon vipers, acid-shooting beetles, alcoholic snails, dangling camel membranes, and the Fat Mouse. They eat elephant trunk Portuguese style and termites cooked by bushmen.

From Otjosvasandu - " the place where the elephants come through" - to the wind-swept desert pan at Okaukuejo, to the Cheringoma plateau, through burning midday mirage and freezing lion-roaring, baboon-sobbing nights, with great sensitivity and fatalism, and an eye for the peculiarities of those who live to survive in the outer reaches, Lynne Tinley records an incredible, fast moving period of human and animal history.