History of the Book
   

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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