Reviews for Spectrum guide to Kenya

The average rating for Spectrum guide to Kenya based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-04-14 00:00:00 David Sharp Vivienne is rather casual about the dangers, and its easy to feel uncomfortable about the stream of bearers she brought to carry tents, supplies, the bookcase and the record player through Kenya to camp. Yet look closely and her light ironic writing covers a full understanding that she is wandering, often alone, among rhinos, lions, snakes, and unexplored dense scrubby jungle, split with chasms, fires, and precipices. A few years before this, her beloved father was killed by a lion (while hunting). Yet here she is fuelled by an overwhelming, cascading love for nature and the magic around her. Personally I always worry when she climbs an ant hill for a view point- where were the ants?

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-18 00:00:00 Newlyn Stephenson Vivienne De Watteville describes her second journey to Kenya, her first being a collecting expedition with her father for the Bern museum that ended with her father's death. In this journey, Vivienne is determined to ignore the accepted manner of nature study in the 1920's, that is, shooting everything one can in order to obtain specimens to study. She travels with a few hired helpers and a camera, staying first in the arid lowlands and then for six months on the slopes of Mt. Kenya. Her descriptions are vivid and her personal manner charming. She's clearly brave but not macho or self obsessed. Still reads like great travel writing 90 years later when many much later travel books have become dated. A personal favorite I have read several times, it always makes me want to go out exploring.