The End of the Game: The Last Word from Paradise

About this book

A landmark book on Africa revisited: The origins history and prospects of big game in Africa Researched photographed and compiled over 20 years Peter Beards End of the Game tells the tale of the enterprisers explorers missionaries and big-game hunters whose quests for adventure and "progress" were to change the face of Africa in the 20th century. This landmark volume is assembled from hundreds of historical photographs and writings starting with the building of the Mombasa Railroad ("The Lunatic Line") and the opening-up of darkest Africa. The stories behind the heroic figures in Beards workTheodore Roosevelt Frederick Courtney Selous Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) Denys Finch-Hatton (the romantic hero of Out of Africa) Philip Percival J. A. Hunter Ernest Hemingway and J. H. Patterson (who became famous as the relentless hunter of the "Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo")are all contextualized by Beards own photographs of the enormous region. Shot in the 1960s and 70s in the Tsavo lowlands during the elephant-habitat crisis and then in Uganda parks Beards studies of elephant and hippo population dynamics document the inevitable overpopulation and starvation of tens of thousands of elephants and rhinos. Originally published in 1965 and updated in 1977 this classic is resurrected by TASCHEN with rich duotone reproduction and a new foreword by internationally renowned travel and fiction writer Paul Theroux. Touching on themes such as distance from nature density and stress loss of common sense and global emergencies this seminal picture history of eastern Africa in the first half of the 20th century shows us the origins of the wildlife crisis on the continent a phenomenon which bears a remarkable resemblance to the overpopulation and climate crises we face today.