Chris Johns, Editor-in-Chief of National Geographic magazine, was named…

Chris Johns, Editor-in-Chief of National Geographic magazine, was named Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1979 while a staff photographer for the Topeka Capital-Journal. Before joining National Geographic magazine in 1995 and becoming senior editor of illustrations in 2001, Johns worked as a freelance photographer for Life, Time, and National Geographic. The author of Valley of Life: Africa's Great Rift, he lives with his family on a farm in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

Peter Godwin grew up in the Zimbabwe bush and attended university in England before becoming an award-winning foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Times and the BBC. He is the author of four books, including Rhodesians Never Die and Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa. He lives in New York.

Reprising the years-long, in-depth collaboration that produced much of National Geographic magazine's…

Reprising the years-long, in-depth collaboration that produced much of National Geographic magazine's coverage of southern Africa, award-winning photographer Chris Johns and veteran foreign correspondent Peter Godwin present this important critical exploration of the region's myriad facets and its collisions between tradition and modernity, conservation and development, and people and animals.

In evocative photographs and accompanying anecdotal text, Wild at Heart crisscrosses southern Africa—from the Kalahari Desert and Drakensburg Mountains to the Skeleton coast and Zambesi River—to reveal its diverse populations and wildlife and highlight their often unacknowledged interdependence. Johns's superb photographs of wildlife, including cheetahs, rhinos, and elephants, and his sensitive portraits of Himba pastoralists, San Bushmen hunter-gatherers, Zulu farmers, and other populations are combined with Godwin's passionate, lyric stories that both entertain and enlighten. The result is a finely detailed yet panoramic image of southern Africa that underscores the indissoluble connections between all its elements and speculates on the prospects for a future based on understanding those connections.

Beautifully presented in a unique, oversize format with a top-opening spine that allows gallery-quality presentation of the images, Wild at Heart is destined to become a classic.