Zara's Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa
Beard's memoir, dedicated to his daughter, Zara, has the delicious suspense of a tale told to a child—one who knows the teller escaped to tell his story. An adventurer with a conservationist's calling (preserving East Africa's wildlife) and a photographer's craft, Beard captures "the old world, the wild life, the wild animals, and the wonderful things we may or may not have left behind" with words and pictures (some photographs, some drawings and lots of "dawdles and dipsy doodles"). Monster lions offer "a midnight fright-night incident so dark and sudden I can only tell it to Zara in the daytime," and a large crocodile takes up residence at a camp site. There are moments of quiet beauty, as when "a family of giraffes float past our open tents like shimmering ghosts in the moonlight," and wild days with "the most eccentric local animal trapper in the history of this eccentric calling." Occasionally Beard meditates on life or remonstrates on the factors threatening it. The bongos Beard captures on film and the elephants he does not manage to outrun hold the book's center. Although Beard's adventures abound, at heart this is a father's memoir for his daughter. Composed with a writer's ear and a photographer's eye, this is a book to share, something for both the young Zaras and the sophisticated Peters. 145 illus.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.