In 1953, when Dorothy Stephens and her husband lived in married student housing at the University of Michigan, she envisioned a safe, conventional life ahead. She never imagined living in Kenya toward the end of the Mau Mau uprising, plunged into an exotic new world, facing safari ants, wild bees, and a vicious monkey, and discovering a core of strength deep in her security-loving soul.

See Kenya through her eyes in its last tumultuous days as a British colony and witness the transformative effect on her life. Meet the emerging young leaders of the independence movement and the fascinating women who became her friends. Travel to Murchison Falls in Uganda and to Ngorongoro Crater in Tanganyika. Accompany her, with her house servant and three young children, on a three-hundred-mile drive to the Kenya coast through desolate bush inhabited by big game, a trip that had a profound and lasting impact.