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If you are interested in learning about how
Brother In The Bush came to life. You have come to the
right destination.
Brother In The Bush is a coming-of-awareness memoir about what the
experience of Africa has meant to a 21st-century African American. I
was a successful stockbroker who “made it” as a black man
in America, but who faced how violently fragile life can be after
confronting, shooting, and killing an intruder in my Baltimore row
house. When I embarked on a series of trips to East Africa, I was
seduced and humbled by the region’s contrasting realities, beauties,
and dangers, and my identity as an African American was deepened and
transformed.
My travels prompted me to question my place in America, where
different varieties of fear rule everyone to one degree or another. I
have
encountered ways of life that expanded my sense of possibility and
changed my conceptions of life’s purpose and meaning. Some say I have
a
vivid, blunt, and erudite narrative voice that moves back and forth from
my past, growing up in the sixties and seventies, to the
present-tense of my journeys. Each chapter functions as a discrete,
self-contained essay that unearths, probes, and assesses the truths
that Africa teaches me about life—and all of our lives—in today’s
America.
I am a graduate of Tuskegee University’s School of
Veterinary Medicine and formerly worked in the financial industry for
Morgan Stanley, First Union, and other firms. I am the founder of
Brooks Photography, for which I now lead photo safaris to East
Africa. My home is in Baltimore.
I left
the brokerage industry in October 2002, moved to a farmhouse in
Hagerstown Maryland, and devoted the next passage of my life to the
completion of this book.
While
experiencing my first tour to East Africa in 1998, my life changed
from the inside out. This first tour was seminal in beginning the new
level of mental questioning that forms the basis for this book,
inspired by the spiritual nature of traveling along paths that had
changed relatively little for hundreds of years.
I went to
Africa to see the animals, but it was the people who changed my life.
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