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| Cry of the Kalahari | 
| Authors: Mark James Owens, Cordelia Dykes Owens
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy Used: $2.93
You Save: $13.07 (82%)
New (21) Collectible (2) from $8.54
Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 127463
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0395647800
Dewey Decimal Number: 591.96811
UPC: 046442647809
EAN: 9780395647806
ASIN: 0395647800
Publication Date: October 15, 1992
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: SERVICEABLE copy.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Cry of the Kalahari January 10, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a fantastic and TRUE story that will capture the hearts of anyone who loves nature, wild animals, adventure, hardship, and over coming huge odds. It is a love story on several levels. It is a story about love of nature, love of animals, and the author couples love for each other. Excellent reading.
Cry the Kalahari September 2, 2006
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
The story is riveting, heart warming and inspiring. Mark & Delia's tales of courage. commitment, gile and passion are an inspiration for all.
Top of the line for lovers of nature adventure romance ... August 22, 2006
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Everyone should read this book. Having said that, here are some goods & some bads about THE CRY OF THE KALAHARI.
Good. Mark & Delia Owens are lunatics and, fortunately for us all, just my favorite kind of lunatic. How they did what they did bewilders me, 7 years in the Kalahari in the most "vegan" kind of bush existence, to mix culinary with safari parlance, lofting food stuffs & locking up water to avoid stirring up nature's settled animal social arrangements. It is simply among the most remarkable stories of this type that I've ever read.
THE CRY OF THE KALAHARI is probably the best written of this genre too, much better than most, nearly literary; indeed, I think it literary nonfiction, good by any standard. One often recalls recent books, particularly the best, & sometimes has odd thoughts about them, like my surmise that, despite traditional roles or stereotypes, Delia is the hard-nut scientist and Mark is the brawn & nascent literati...
The point is, this is good stuff & it stays with you, no matter where you're coming from, as a naturalist or wannabe field scientist, environmentalist, whatever. You make a lot of friends throughout the book, especially the animals.
Bad. The book is riveting &, throughout the 1st half, we make any number of new friends among the lions, brown hyaenas, & various other Kalahari inhabitants, & learn a lot about them, see them struggle & watch their kids grow up. Somewhere just after the midpoint, however, we start losing them one by one to legal hunting safaris, mismanagement, poaching, & to a super-long drought or, more generally, to nature herself. It was all I could do to stagger from one chapter to the next, but I finished it; & happy I am that I did.
I wouldn't dissuade anyone from reading THE CRY OF THE KALAHARI - On the contrary! That's why I gave it 5 stars & would give it more. But do brace yourself - It's a hard ride. It may put you hunters off your feed for a while, which is probably what the authors intended; to my lights, they overshot their mark a bit.
In the authors' defense, one occasionally reads criticism of them & their African projects, programs & methods; as best I can tell, however, almost always from armchair scholars whose vast knowledge & experience derive solely from their reading. Having some modest experience with odd projects in strange places on wonky funding, my hat's off the Mark & Delia Owens. I couldn't do what they did & wouldn't even want to try, but what they did is valuable, & THE CRY OF THE KALAHARI is a great & enlightening read.
 A Good Read but the Start of a Dangerous Trend February 24, 2006
22 out of 32 found this review helpful
This is not a new book; I read it years ago and enjoyed it. I would have given it 5 stars then. But when I re-read it last year, I realized it belongs alongside the Timothy Treadwell books/films and the Ian Hamilton (elephants) documentaries/books, about people endangering the very animals they love through relentlessly habituating them to people and pestering them to the point where Hamilton and the Owens', at least, are lucky to have escaped with a whole skin. This whole trend toward getting as close as possible to large dangerous animals is so detrimental to the animals themselves that it infuriates me.
The Owens' lions, used to people letting them roam around camp and sit down among them, and anthropomorphized with cute names like Muffin, were clearly going to get into trouble the first time they met other, less starry-eyed people in the Kalahari or in the villages and towns surrounding it. The Owens did them a real disservice.
That being said, and if you can ignore that aspect of it, this remains an interesting read - the camplife and the desert landscape are fascinating, and I believe that, at the time the authors carried out their project, the dangers of habituation, etc., were still not fully understood...
Captivating October 2, 2005
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
I have been to Botswana and find the Cry of the Kalahari a testiment to the struggles between nature and preservation. This book is captivating, interesting, detailed and motivational.
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Wildlife, nature and the Environment
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