Status Updates From Wildlife Wars: My Fight to ...

The Kenyan author was in a plane crash that catastrophically damaged his legs. He reached out internationally, asking who the best surgeon would be - and the surgeon recommended was from Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham.

I used to live right by QMC, which is attached to my university. Was not expecting QMC to come up in a book about stopping elephant poaching, and feeling secondhand proud of the staff there.

"One key ingredient to a successful marriage is the patience simply to wait out the difficult times."

"[A] very senior government official had asked me, 'Why are you so ungrateful?' . . . I replied. 'Having a highly stressed, personally dangerous existence with bodyguards around me all the time is hardly something to feel gratitude about.' 'No, no,' said the official, 'you misunderstand. You have been put in a very special position from which you can make a great deal of money for yourself and for us, your friends.'"

"Prior to the British colonization of Kenya, the cattle-herding M[a]asai inhabited much of the land in the southern part of our country; they arrived here about four hundred years ago, displacing an earlier pastoral people. With their herds, the Maasai wandered . . . seeking fresh pasture and water. The Maasai shared their land with an abundance of wildlife . . . . "

"The main market [for rhino horn] used to be the Middle East, where it was used for ceremonial dagger handles, but this has changed in recent years because imitation plastics have become popular. The new market is in China and other Eastern countries, where the alternative medical therapy trade is flourishing."

Medieval to modern: "[A]s early as the [1000s], Arab traders began travelling into the interior of East Africa seeking ivory and slaves. Tusks and people were shipped by sea on dhows to the Far East and to the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf. Some slaves were kept to work on coastal plantations. When the British colonized East Africa in the late 1800s, they put an end to slavery but continued the ivory trade."