A field diary written by a (poetic) naturalist for naturalists & other extremely patient people who will tire through detailed descriptions of various fowl (peafowl, water fowl, rock fowl), stone partridges, francolins, laughing doves, pranticoles, etc for Matthiessen's tiny shocks of lovely, dreamy description. He's pedantic, meditative and transcendental all the while, which is why it's taken me forever to make any headway. I picked this up right before my parents headed off for the jungles and lakes of Tanzania and, months later, I'm still only occasionally picking it up to read a handful of pages. His writing style perfectly suits the subject: unbroken jungles, impenetrable forests, fetish houses, marginal environments and sub-groups, phantasmagoria, liana-strewn cloud forests and spindly bridges. He wrote this in 1978, but his observation at the time was that East Africa's wildlife was suffering primarily from intensive settlement, while West Africa was suffering because of outright destruction of the animals themselves. Does anyone have recommendations for more timely, non-fiction books on Africa?
