Books like The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness

I liked this book as I was reading it although I knew it was dated having been published in 1992. It was educational, if heartbreaking, and really immersed me in North Lunagwa National Park in Zambia. The book begins as the Owenses are expelled from Botswana and the Kalahari, their original project in Africa. It is never really made clear to the reader or to Mark and Delia Owens why they were expelled but they assumed it was because they were exposing non-environmental practices that were directly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of wild animals. After months and years of fighting to stay, they finally decided to move on and settled in Zambia in a national park where elephants (and other wild animals) were being poached and slaughtered by the thousands. The remainder of the book is devoted to how Mark and Delia worked to rid the park of poachers and educate the surrounding villages in conservation and prove to them that they can make more money and live better lives if the animals are allowed to live. Safari tourism will pay more and create more jobs than poaching and the eventual extinction of the animals. It was a constant uphill battle given that the very people charged with stamping out poachers, the game wardens, the rangers, the law enforcement officials, and the politicians, were all closing their eyes to the problem and, worse, profiting from poaching and the ivory trade.Eventually Mark and Delia come to a parting of the ways with each other as Mark becomes more and more obsessed with terrorizing the poachers, a tactic that Delia finds she can no longer support. By this time they had worn themselves out and their health was in serious jeopardy. The book ends on a bit of a hopeful note when a new democratic regime is voted in and worldwide the ivory trade is shut down and policies begin to change in favor of conservation. We leave Mark and Delia mending their relationship and realizing that the Marulu-Puku is their home.Before I could review the book, in researching whether Mark and Delia are still married (they are not), I read an article about the making of a documentary about their time in Zambia and the documentary apparently painted a much different picture than the book. Even as I was reading the book I was asking myself if these two could really be THIS extraordinarily good and if Mark could really be as obsessed and yet as restrained as he was. The documentary revealed a lot of not so good that was going on behind the book scenes. Who knows where the truth actually lies but the article did color my opinion of the book, especially in that those supporters that are named in the book no longer support the Owenses efforts and many tell an entirely different story of their time there than the book reveals. The Owenses no longer live in Zambia. It is unclear whether they decided to leave or if they fled in the midst of death threats and looming legal charges. They live separately on a huge ranch in Idaho where, in a complete departure from all she has previously known, Delia recently wrote and published the smash bestselling novel, Where the Crawdads Sing.Their hearts were in the right place and much good seems to have come from their research and their educational programs but it seems like maybe their focus and eventual obsession may have sent them off the rails, as often happens. It is hard to find fault with them given the lack of support they had, worldwide, in such an admirable pursuit as the conservation of wildlife in Africa. They were environmentalists ahead of their time, futilely battling windmills in their effort to bring awareness to a world who just couldn't or didn't want to hear them.