This book was just as good as Don't Look Behind You!: A Safari Guide's Encounters with Ravenous Lions, Stampeding Elephants, and Lovesick Rhinos, its sequel which I inadvertently read first. In fact, it may be even better. The stories hung together in a more uniform way, they were all indisputably about animals and guiding in Africa, and they were maybe even a little funnier.

Unfortunately, whoever designed the cover is still a moron. It's Photoshopped. And not even Photoshopped well. I think it may be three pictures: the bush, the lion (and, I may be wrong, but given her weight looks suspiciously like a captive lion) and a dumb safari hat between her front paws. You can tell some person who doesn't think that animals are interesting or exciting or enough decided it needed the hat to give it an element of excitement. Instead it just annoys me and makes me want a different cover. But that's not really to the point, and I already addressed this idiocy with the last cover, so I suppose I'll drop it.

Allison has a wonderful way of telling a story that's conversational and draws you in. It's exactly the way you'd expect to hear it told around a campfire in Botswana, only without the omnipresent risk of malaria. He has a hilarious offhand way of throwing in a phrase ("I could get trampled by an elephant or Paul could get bitten by a guest . . . ") that makes you snort out loud.

This book does not have as many endearing, and, in the end, heartbreaking, characters as Don't Look Behind You!: A Safari Guide's Encounters with Ravenous Lions, Stampeding Elephants, and Lovesick Rhinos did (I'm thinking here of Stompie the lion and Kinky Tail the cheetah) but the animals are all throughout the book, and his fondness for him, and devotion to their conservation shines through in a most enjoyable way.

I highly recommend this book.