Starlings Laughing: A Memoir of Africa

From Publishers Weekly
Clark ( Wild Eden ) looks back on a life of adventure and personal difficulty in Africa. Raised in a Rhodesian mining town, she started a farm near Bulawayo and lived for many years in a tent on an island in the Okavango Swamp Delta in Bechuanaland (now Botswana). She and her first husband hunted crocodiles, ran safaris and convinced the local tribes to create the Moremi Wildlife Reserve, the first such reserve in Africa. Clark was able to make pets of lions and jackals and survive encounters with leopards, wounded lions, pythons and veld fires, yet for 25 years she was unable to disentangle herself from her destructive marriage. Now living in England with her second husband, she paints a vivid picture of a stormy first marriage as well as of the land and the people of southern Africa during the final days of British colonialism. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This is an autobiographical account of a woman who grew up and lived much of her life in Africa in the days just before independence. Much of the story takes place in what is now Zimbabwe, where she and her husband attempted to run a farm and, later on, in the Kalahari desert of what is now Botswana, where they were ultimately involved in creating a game reserve. As such, it reads like a cross between Elspeth Huxley's writings and Joy Adamson's Born Free . It is an honest, interesting narrative and an exam ple of what life was like for Europeans during the colonial era. This book should appeal to the general reader interested in biography, travel accounts, or books about animals (the author has published three books about her work with animals under the name of June Kay). Recommended.- Paul H. Thomas, Hoover Inst. Lib., Stanford Univ., Cal.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.


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This is an autobiographical account of a woman who grew up and lived much of her life in Africa in the days just before independence. Much of the story takes place in what is now Zimbabwe, where she and her husband attempted to run a farm and, later on, in the Kalahari desert of what is now Botswana, where they were ultimately involved in creating a game reserve. As such, it reads like a cross between Elspeth Huxley's writings and Joy Adamson's Born Free . It is an honest, interesting narrative and an exam ple of what life was like for Europeans during the colonial era. This book should appeal to the general reader interested in biography, travel accounts, or books about animals (the author has published three books about her work with animals under the name of June Kay). Recommended.-- Paul H. Thomas, Hoover Inst. Lib., Stanford Univ., Cal.


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