South Africa can be divided into three major geographic regions: a nearly mile-high interior plateau, a series of tall mountain chains encircling it, and coastal plains and marshes that in turn ring the mountains. In these three regions exist very different biogeographic features, among them deserts, upland forests, grasslands, inland seas, and broad rivers. The South African team of writer Alan Mountain and photographer Lex Hes capture some of the beauty of their homeland in this oversize, heavily illustrated book, which treats these biogeographic features in turn; they also provide ample notes on the region"s highly specialized flora and fauna, from sugarbirds to cheetahs to towering succulents. (Wary readers will be interested to know, for instance, that South Africa contains some 130 species of snakes--of which, the authors helpfully note, only 14 have been known to cause death in humans.) Hes and Mountain are especially attentive to conservation issues, which are becoming ever more pressing in South Africa, owing to development and population growth. They note, for example, that where large tracts of forest used to exist along the coastal plains, only a section of about 125 miles of forested land now stands on the southern Cape, the last of the indigenous hardwoods. And they note that any meaningful conservation measures will depend on the active involvement and good will of the rural poor, whose numbers are rapidly growing. --Gregory McNamee