Excerpt: 'Wildflower'

June 11, 2009— -- The story of wildlife filmmaker Joan Root comes alive in "Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa." Journalist Mark Seal describes Root's love of animals, her passionate romance with her filmmaker husband, and her mission to preserve Kenya's Lake Naivasha.

After Root and her husband of 20 years divorced, she was trying to rediscover herself before she was mysteriously murdered at her farmhouse in Kenya, Seal writes.

Read an excerpt of the book below.

She always knew he would come back to her.He would climb into his helicopter at first light one Nairobi morningand rise above the screaming madhouse of the city, tilting west overEast Africa's largest slum, and flying out into wonder: out over theGreat Rift Valley, the cradle of civilization, a three- thousand- mile- longseam in the earth that stretches from Syria to Mozambique but is at itsmost glorious here in Kenya. As the floor of the world dropped away,opening into endless sky and a breathtaking vista, he would follow thiscorridor straight back to her.

There were things she longed to tell him, things only he would understand.Everything she'd been too shy and self- effacing to say beforewould now come pouring out, just as it had in all of the letters she hadwritten him, letters she never sent:

A lifetime has passed since we split, and yet some memories ofthings we did together seem [as if they happened] only the otherday. There is so much I would like to say and share with you—nowI know I am not inferior to you.

She waited for him in her blue house beside the lake, which lookedso perfect and placid from the air. But this was merely another extremein a country where great beauty coexists with unimaginable brutality,where the border between life and death is the thinnest of lines, wherenothing is ever as it seems.

Now in contact with others, I realize how knowledgeable I amabout the natural world. . . . People respect me nowadays. But theonly love of my life is one of the few people I cannot communicatewith, even as a friend.

She could leave all that pain behind as soon as he came back into herlife. Flying over the mountains and dormant volcanoes that form a naturalamphitheater around the lake, he would hover over the emeraldgreenwater, taking in its wide, verdant, wildlife- infested expanse.

When you flew over and saw the blue house you were probablyhappy you didn't live here anymore, but I am really such a differentperson, I hardly know myself. I have written you so many letters inmy head but when I try to write I go to pieces.