National Park Science: A Century of Research in South Africa, by Jane Carruthers

Professor Emeritus Jane Carruthers in the book under review has given scholarship a magisterial and enduring reflection on her lifetime research. It is in the format of Jan Vansina’s Living with Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994) and a similar farewell work by Roland Anthony Oliver (In the Realms of Gold: Pioneering in African History, Routledge, 1997). Carruthers is a pioneer in historical research on ecology in the same way that Vansina and Oliver founded academic African history in the 1950s. I would title Carruthers’s book “Living with History and the Science of National Parks.” From the time I met the author in the 1990s and bought her major work on the Kruger National Park, I have always been aware of her unique scholarship. The book with its listing of some of her publications (pp. 470–472) is a rare library of unimaginable value. Here is a book that brings out connections of history with other branches of knowledge. There is a lot for the specialist and the uninitiated alike here. This is a book with unlimited usefulness; I shall demonstrate this with two examples.