The Peoples of Kenya is much more than a fashion catalogue, and if you overlook the text you will be passing up quite an adventure. Although tribal ways in Kenya today are little more than a tourist floor show, a handful of people still manage to live as they did centuries before the invention of travelers' checks. Mrs. Adamson's word-pictures of their isolated communities—particularly in the cruelly magnificent, measureless crematorium of Kenya's northern region—are no less vivid than her paintings. To read her accounts of how these prehistoric tribes turn their backs on jet-age society and transform grim survival into a rewarding way of life is to enjoy the weird and beautiful experience of a journey through a lost dimension of time.

Charles L. Miller, "Brave Record of a Vanishing Culture," in Saturday Review (copyright © 1967 by Saturday Review; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. L...