A Love Affair with Africa
Don Shay’s Endangered Liaisons presents an extraordinarily impassioned and eloquent evocation of riches revealed and lessons learned in two decades of African adventures.
For many travelers, an African safari is a once in a lifetime experience. At least, that’s what they think before they embark. Don Shay thought just that two decades ago, when he undertook an African photo safari. But what he found on that journey – the wild animals and wild places – got inside him and changed him. In the ensuing years he has returned 13 times, visiting nine countries and dozens of wildlife preserves in two to four week increments.
Shay’s coffeetable book, Endangered Liaisons, is an eloquent and sumptuous evocation of the love affair that ensued. Each of the book’s nine chapters focuses in photos and words on a different journey in Africa, including tracking the Great Migration in the Serengeti, following a lioness as she hunts in the Masai Mara, climbing the Virunga volcanoes of Rwanda for a poignant encounter with mountain gorillas, and cruising the Chobe River on a quest for elephants
Over the years Shay has accumulated encyclopedic knowledge of the intricate interrelations of the African ecosystem, and he shares that information with enthusiasm, passion, and a graceful
sense of perspective. He is wonderfully down to earth in his descriptions of his African adventures, mingling disappointment with drama, and infusing all with a heightened awareness of the fragile beauty of the land and its inhabitants.
Shay’s images and tales are equally vivid, compelling, and illuminating. Endangered Liaisons is clearly a labor of love, and it rewards readers with a new appreciation of Africa’s wild -- and all too often endangered – wonders.
[Endangered Liaisons; text and photography by Don Shay; Alarus Press; hardcover, 320 pages; $60. A portion of the proceeds from each sale is donated to the African Wildlife Foundation.]
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