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Welcome!
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I have been writing books about scientific and natural history subjects since completing a Ph.D. in English in 1977. After a couple of years working my day job as a carpenter, I published a history of psychiatry (1436 to 1975), told from the perspective of the patients. Then I wrote four books on computers. But by the mid-1980s I had found my true subject, which is animals: their lives, meaning, and fate. I’ve traveled around the world, explored tropical forests from South America to Africa to Madagascar, to India and Southeast Asia—looking for wild animals. I’ve also examined how people treat animals, conducting undercover investigations in the United States, surveying wild animal meat markets in Central Africa and Asia, interviewing gorilla hunters and elephant marketers in Africa, following the trail of illegal animal body parts from northern Burma into Yunan Province, China… and so on.
My friendship with Jane Goodall has lent yet another angle to this interest, since she’s introduced me to the scientific world of primatology and to field research on primates, as well to so many issues related to conservation and the ethics of our relationship with the world’s many other living creatures.
I’ve made many good friends through my writing, but I will still say that writing must be the loneliest of the arts, and I always welcome notes and letters from my readers.
My latest book: Elephant Reflections
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| • | “This is a stunning book. It is the best book ever about this most majestic of animals.” —Jane Goodall |
| • | “A stunning testament to the last of the giants standing, bereft, at the door of ancient time.” —Publishers’ Weekly (starred review) |
| • | “This gorgeous book… will convince you that the elephant is one of nature’s greatest and most original works.” —Scientific American |
Brief description: “I was encouraged to write this book by two editors at the University of California Press: a text to accompany my friend Karl Ammann’s collection of gorgeous elephant photographs in a coffee-table style book. Karl and I had already seen (and he had photographed) elephants in the Wonga-Wongué Forest Reserve of Gabon. Now, in working on the book, we traveled into the mountains of northwestern Burma to watch (and touch) Asian elephants trained to work in the timber industry, and then to Africa to look at and photograph the forest elephants in the Dzanga-Sanga Reserve of Central Africa Republic and the savanna elephants of Amboseli National Park and Samburu Reserve, both in Kenya. I love elephants.”
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