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By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
The subtitle of Mark Seal’s fascinating new biography is telling: An Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa. The woman at the center of Wildflower, a white Kenyan named Joan Root, died in a horrifying way. On Jan. 13, 2006, gunmen shot Root, 69, to death in her bedroom on Lake Naivasha in Kenya’s Happy Valley.

She led an astonishing life.

Born in Kenya in 1936 to a British-born coffee planter who also operated photo safaris during which tourists shot photographs, not animals, Joan Root grew up tall, beautiful, and utterly at home in the wild. Painfully shy, she revealed her emotions only to her diaries, journals and letters, which Seal quotes.

But her beauty was sometimes glimpsed by the world after she married her fellow Kenyan, filmmaker Alan Root, in 1961. The cameraman on a 1959 Oscar-winning documentary about the Serengeti, Alan Root would go on to make notable wildlife films in the 1960s and ’70s. Joan was his producer and occasional subject, swimming with giant turtles in one production.

Their marriage and partnership fell apart in 1982, when Alan Root fell in love with another woman. Joan Root found herself stripped of her identity, personally and professionally. Always hoping Alan would return, Joan lived alone in their house on Lake Naivasha.

The area was made famous in James Fox’s book White Mischief and the subsequent movie starring Greta Scacchi. Before World War II, it was a hedonistic paradise for wealthy colonists drawn to its pristine beauty and teeming wildlife.

By the 1980s, things had changed in Happy Valley. It is now the center of a multimillion-dollar commercial flower industry. Giant plastic hothouses crowd the lakefront, and pesticides are killing the lake. The commercial nurseries also have drawn people, crime and poachers. Trying to protect the lake and its wildlife, Root hired guards to stop the poaching.

No one has been convicted of her murder, but Seal believes she may have been targeted because of her environmental efforts.

The best aspect of Wildflower is Seal’s ability to pull various elements into a compelling narrative: the personal love story. The physical splendor of Africa and its endangered wildlife. And the desperate Africans living on a dollar a day, their poverty and lethal tribal conflicts legacies from European colonial policies.

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