Author: Elizabeth L. Gilbert

Publisher/Date: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003

Format/Condition: NEW large hardcover book with dust jacket, 192 pages, meawsures 9 ½ x 13 inches; profusely illustrated.

Description: This album of 120 superb, warmly toned black and white photos presents images that could almost have come from any time since the invention of the camera. Photojournalist Elizabeth Gilbert set out on a four-year journey to document what may be the last generations of traditional tribal Maasai in Africa, living in a 5,000-square-mile reserve of bush country between Nairobi and Tanzania. Her text describes the history of colonial Africa and the mingled destinies of the Maasai and the British. Here too are archival photos from the 19th century and reproductions of historic photos, documents, and land treaties.

“Liz Gilbert’s astonishing African portraits bring to mind both the texture and the feeling of Edward S. Curtis’s work on the American Indians of the early 1900s. Her images of the daily life of the Maasai will stand alongside his as a classic portrait of a noble people whose way of life is slowly disappearing.”—George Plimpton