Pursuing Giraffe

"This book is...about one person's intellectual imagination, spirit of adventure, and daring: where she has long dreamed of going, where others either say she shouldn't or cannot go, and some work against her going, she goes....Anne Innis Dagg has written a brave and moving account of her time as a young white woman travelling and doing research in Southern and East Africa." -- Mark Behr, author of The Smell of Apples and Embrace -- 200601
"Dagg ... learned a great deal about giraffe ... but those studies are among the least significant reasons for reading this wonderful memoir ... Instead it should be read because it's an engaging, amusing, thoughtful, charming, honest, probing and eye-opening account of a young Canadian woman's encounters with racism, with sexism, with colonialism and with the animal kingdom in general and people in particular--especially men.... Dagg is a natural story-teller." -- Jon Fear -- The Record (Kitchener), March 10, 2007, 200703
"This beautifully written book explores a young Canadian biologist's field studies on giraffes, and her impressions of Africa and its people in the mid-1950s. But her story is much more than just research into giraffe behaviour and life in Africa. Anne Innis Dagg is most concerned about what she learned, while in Africa, about herself. Pursuing Giraffe relates the tale, through stories of giraffes and the evolving situation within Africa, of a brave person's effort to live life honestly ... travelling alone, pursuing zoological research at a time when work in the field was not only rare but also totally male-driven.... One cannot forget when reading Pursuing Giraffe that its bones rest on a journal that had been kept over 1956 and 1957, and the immediacy of that journal is one of the book's most powerful attributes." -- Margaret Derry -- University of Toronto Quarterly, Letters in Canada 2006, Volume 77, Number 1, Winter 2008, 200807