Alan and joan root wildflower
Joan Root with birds (from WILDFLOWER) | "In Alan and Joan's ....
Alan and joan root wildflower
'Wildflower' explores Joan Root's African life, violent death
The subtitle of Mark Seal's fascinating new biography is telling: An Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa. The woman at the center of Wildflower, a white Kenyan named Joan Root, died in a horrifying way.
On Jan. 13, 2006, gunmen shot Root, 69, to death in her bedroom on Lake Naivasha in Kenya's Happy Valley.
She led an astonishing life.
Born in Kenya in 1936 to a British-born coffee planter who also operated photo safaris during which tourists shot photographs, not animals, Joan Root grew up tall, beautiful, and utterly at home in the wild.
Painfully shy, she revealed her emotions only to her diaries, journals and letters, which Seal quotes.
But her beauty was sometimes glimpsed by the world after she married her fellow Kenyan, filmmaker Alan Root, in 1961.
The cameraman on a 1959 Oscar-winning documentary about the Serengeti, Alan Root would go on to make notable wildlife films in the 1960s and '70s. J