Mara-Serengeti captures the essence of living in the Mara-Serengeti region in a way that you would not experience in a dozen safaris to Africa. The images of predators, prey, wildlife migrations, and the Masai bring you close up during moments of blazing color in the sky and dramatic action in the grasslands. The images are improved by thoughtful essays that draw on the photographers' many years of experience with these subjects. The animal photographs are mostly grouped by subject and include lions, leopards, zebras, wart hogs, impalas, cheetahs, wildebeest, hyenas, crocodiles, vultures, and wild dogs. The subjects are usually of animal families, migration, killing, and eating in often symbolic settings for these activities. The Masai images come at the book's end, sort of completing the evolutionary progression of the food chain.
You probably have heard of the Serengeti. It's a vast grassland in Tanzania, and is now protected as the Serengeti National Park there. The Masai Mara National Reserve is in neighboring Kenya, and the two lands are connected geographically, if not politically. A map in the book will display all of this for you. This site is the area where humans probably first walked the face of the Earth, and the dwindling of these remarkable spaces marks the potential for us to lose our ability to visualize our roots.
The name, Serengeti, in Masai means "land of endless space." The closest we have to this habitat in the United States that I have seen is the brief enclosure in the wild animal park that the San Diego zoo maintains near Escondido, California.
The action photographs impressed me the most. These show predators literally flying and spinning in the air just before they land while the terrorized prey wheels desperately away. The action is captured almost like a key play in a sporting event. That's pretty typical of the photography here. The images emphasize action and perspectives that you do not yet have, and this book will add wonderfully to your sense of the special nature of the grasslands of Africa.
After you have finished expanding your vision of natural selection, I suggest that you think about the ways that our lives are enhanced by understanding our origins and how our lives are not. How can we draw inspiration from nature and stand in our most meaningful role?
Look for what few have seen . . . always! Truth will emerge from your trial.
