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Don't Look Behind You!

A Safari Guide's Encounters with Ravenous Lions, Stampeding Elephants, and Lovesick Rhinos

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Incredible true tales from a world-renowned safari guide and celebrated author

Romantic notions aside, being a safari guide isn't always particularly enjoyable or glamorous. Quite often it is beset with challenges, like having to spend a night in a thorn tree with marauding hyenas below. But safari guide Peter Allison lives for such moments. Here, the author of the widely praised Whatever You Do, Don't Run details his time spent in safari camps not only in Botswana but also in South Africa, Mozambique, and Namibia—places he loves, despite how much it feels like they might just be trying to kill him.

In Don't Look Behind You, Allison recounts adventures few would live to tell. Like the time he and a group of bored guides launched a makeshift raft into a foaming, flooded river teeming with hippos and crocodiles. Or the afternoon he heard monkeys telling him that a leopard was walking around the camp, and then realized the leopard was in his tent, with him in it.

In addition to relating his encounters with animals, Allison shares the stories of those tourists who have long been pushing him toward early retirement. Normally respectful of all his fellow creatures no matter how many feet they have, Allison fantasizes about leaving one in particular behind on the Skeleton Coast, a place that receives less than half an inch of rain a year, and is patrolled by lions and hyenas.

Join Peter Allison for another riveting, rollicking, behind-the-scenes dose of everyone's dream experience—going on safari—and come through amazed but, thankfully, without a scratch.
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    • Kirkus

      July 1, 2009
      Safari guide Allison (Whatever You Do, Don't Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide, 2007) recalls his experiences with deadly animals.

      In ragged chronological fashion, the author takes us on a ten-year journey, from his period of guide training, to his unsatisfying experiences as a trainer of other guides, to his four-year Australian hiatus and, finally, his happy return to Africa. The chapters—mainly stand-alone accounts of his experiences—follow a general pattern: I didn't realize what I was doing; I got in trouble; I escaped with my life! Often the segments begin with a bit of dialogue and feature varying measures of self-deprecation (frequently about his feckless driving), wildlife lore, some exciting bit of danger—often, conveniently, beyond the view of any witnesses other than himself and the beast—and even the occasional insensitive analogy: He makes facetious allusions to both Helen Keller and the fire-bombing of Dresden. Along the way are obligatory I-could've-died moments—often late at night, his only weapon a flashlight with dying batteries—with lions, leopards and a particularly annoyed elephant that punished Allison for trying to snatch a souvenir hair or two from its tail. There are moments of regret, too, generally involving the death of an animal. On one occasion the author informed the local authorities about a buffalo threatening the camp; two shooters arrived to deal with it and enacted what the author calls"an incomprehensively brutal slaughter."

      In some of the world's most remote and fascinating locations, Allison sticks resolutely to the most conventional narrative road.

      (COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

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  • English

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