– Customer review on 26/06/2010

This is a remarkable and beautifully told story of a pair of young American zoologists who came to study the wildlife in 1974. The immediate area - a fossil river bed, edged by scrubby dunes and woodland - would be their home for seven years as they watched lions and hyenas, wild dogs and antelopes, the only humans for miles around. The climate is extraordinary: summer temperatures reaching 120 degrees farenheit, and so dry that perspiration has no time to form. Winter nights in contrast can drop to 14 degrees. Life depends on the vagaries of the brief rainy season, which could turn the fossil river bed to green velvet and fill the mudholes sufficiently to sustain animal life through the year.