The Lion Children
Three clever children write about their lives in Botswana among the lions. With pictures.
Best thing I like about it is, they don't have a hidden agenda. Other than lions--lions are cool. And southern Africa is full of amazing creatures we need to preserve at all costs. But other than that, they're just telling it like it is without a lot of moralizing. They're just kids having adventures, good and bad, but always great.
The family story is pretty beautiful, too. The one thing I never exactly understood was why their mother took them to Africa in the first place. It said she'd begun to study biology and she didn't think that the civilized world was a good place for children to grow up. In the modern world, all knowledge is (apparently) available at the tap of a button; all things we might ever need are easily procured and casually tossed away when no longer useful.
I wasn't brought up that way--I know there are things we don't know. Heaps of them. And I know it's a lot more satisfying to build or invent or concoct things that to buy them on Amazon. But it general, you shouldn't romanticize ignorance, nor should you long for a time when the mere struggle for basic needs could occupy one's whole life. There's a different way to bring up strong, independent children in the modern world, and I expect she would have found it no matter where she went.
But, hey--Africa!
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