Larger Mammals of Africa

This handy little volume is one of three things you should definitely have knocking around loose inside your Land Cruiser on safari. The other two, of course, are the well-stocked drink cooler and Lady Jane. Yes, gin-and-tonic DOES help with malaria, and has far fewer side effects than Larium. In any case, the book is organized in a reasonable way, by families, so that the cats are together in the same section of text and not, for example, strewn about amid elephants and impalas. Thus animals are fairly easy to find even without recourse to the (adequate) index, which lists the page on which descriptive text appears as well as the page on which the animal is illustrated. The illustrations are nicely rendered watercolors that are perhaps less vivid than high-quality photographs might be, but at least show idealized animals that lack any confusing idiosyncracies sometimes seen of individual photographed animals. Certain features of the book are clearly out of date, such as the names of the more recent African countries; Lady Jane was befuddled by a country named Rhodesia occupying the territory of Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, she has been imbibing (in an absolutely out-of-character manner) an American abomination called kamikazes, so she is a trifle under the weather. Another difficulty is that animals that presently are desperately endangered, such as the bongo, were not described as such back in the '70s when most of the text was evidently written. But the written descriptions of the animals are excellent, and most handy in the field, especially when you can find both the text description and the illustration, putting fingers in the book to mark the place of each, and then looking back and forth from text to picture to animal and back again, etc. It is a lot easier than it sounds, even when the Land Cruiser is in one of its bouncier modes. Or ditto Lady Jane