Book Review: Cry of the Kalahari by Mark and Delia Owens
Book Review: Cry of the Kalahari by Mark and Delia Owens
Cry of the Kalahari, by Mark and Delia Owens is an incredible story of two, young, idealistic, scientists, who set out to save our world…quite literally. After meeting in college, studying biology and getting married, they sold almost all of their possessions and flew to Africa to study some of the last and most remote wildernesses on earth.
After much searching they found and settled on Deception Valley, along a fossil river bed deep in the Kalahari Game Reserve. Here they studied lions, brown hyenas and almost any other animal, migratory pattern and desert adaptation they could notice. They tracked animals for hundreds or thousands of hours, endured oppressive 120 degree temperatures, severe drought and heart break all while living in a tent, in the desert, isolated from people and help. It was intense.
Mark and Delia devoted 7 years to their research but more important than their research is their unending quest to make their research heard. Although they are thorough scientists, it’s their dedication and advocacy that is perhaps more impressive. They constantly wrote articles to highlight the issues in the Kalahari; they wrote proposals and sent them to government officials. They endured civil chaos in Botswana in order to return to their research, to save those animals.
The stories told by Mark and Delia are amazing. They way in which they tell them in the book (each person writing a chapter or two and alternating) is refreshing, not confusing and is ingenious. Not only was this book a good read, it made me feel like I was privy to glimpsing into their camp, into their lives without all of the difficulty of actually being there. I felt like I knew the animals they wrote about. At the end of the book when they were flying away from Deception Valley to go back to the U.S., I felt as they must have, they were flying away from those animals and I was leaving those animals too, the book was over.
I whole heartedly recommend Cry of the Kalahari. My review doesn’t do the book justice. You must read it to feel moved the way I felt moved.
