| The Man-Eaters of Tsavo |
J. H. Patterson and Peter H. Capstick |
ISBN: 0312510101, Hardcover - $14.92 BUY
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In 1898 John H. Patterson arrived in East Africa with a mission to build a railway bridge over the Tsavo River. What started out as a simple engineering problem, however, soon took on almost mythical proportions as Patterson and his mostly Indian workforce were systematically hunted by two man-eating lions over the course of several weeks. During that time, 100 workers were killed, and the entire bridge-building project ground to a halt. As if the lions weren't enough, Patterson had to guard his back against his own increasingly hostile and mutinous workers as he set out to track and kill the man-eaters. This larger-than-life tale forms the basis of the entertaining film The Ghost and the Darkness, but for readers who want to know the whole--and true--story, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo comes straight from the great white-hunter's mouth.
Patterson's account of the lions' reign of terror and his own subsequent attempts to kill them is the stuff of great adventure, and his unmistakably Victorian manner of telling it only adds to the thrill. Consider this description of the aftermath of an attack by the lions: "...we at once set out to follow the brutes, Mr. Dalgairns feeling confident that he had wounded one of them, as there was a trail on the sand like that of the toes of a broken limb.... we saw in the gloom what we at first took to be a lion cub; closer inspection, however, showed it to be the remains of the unfortunate coolie, which the man-eaters had evidently abandoned at our approach. The legs, one arm and half the body had been eaten, and it was the stiff fingers of the other arm trailing along the sand which had left the marks we had taken to be the trail of a wounded lion...." This classic tale of death, courage, and terror in the African bush is still a page-turner, even after all these years.
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| Ghost and the Darkness Screenplay |
William Goldman |
ISBN: 1557832676, Paperback - $9.72 BUY
The screenplay by famed author William Goldman, with notes on why he wrote this script and how the movie came to be.
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| Until the Sea Shall Free them |
Robert R. Frump |
ISBN: 038550116, Hardcover - $15.75 BUY
Bob Frump's first book about the wreck of the SS Marine Electtric
Mark Bowden, author, "Black Hawk Down"
"...spellbinding and eloquent...Frump is a master reporter, and his prose grabs you and doesn't let you go."
Book Description
A devastating disaster at sea . . . an officer who refuses to hide the truth. . . a courtroom confrontation with far-reaching implications . . . The Perfect Storm meets A Civil Action in a gripping account of one of the most significant shipwrecks of the twentieth century.
In 1983 the Marine Electric, a “reconditioned” World War II vessel, was on a routine voyage thirty miles off the East Coast of the United States when disaster struck. As the old coal carrier sank, chief mate Bob Cusick watched his crew–his friends and colleagues–succumb to the frigid forty-foot waves and subzero winds of the Atlantic. Of the thirty-four men aboard, Cusick was one of only three to survive. And he soon found himself facing the most critical decision of his life: whether to stand by the Merchant Marine officers’ unspoken code of silence, or to tell the truth about why his crew and hundreds of other lives had been unnecessarily sacrificed at sea.
Like many other ships used by the Merchant Marine, the Marine Transport Line's Marine Electric was very old and made of “dirty steel” (steel with excess sulfur content). Many of these vessels were in terrible condition and broke down frequently. Yet the government persistently turned a blind eye to the potential dangers, convinced that the economic return on keeping these ships was worth the risk.
Cusick chose to blow the whistle.
Until the Sea Shall Free Them re-creates in compelling detail the wreck of the Marine Electric and the legal drama that unfolded in its wake. With breathtaking immediacy, Robert Frump, who covered the story for the Philadelphia Inquirer, describes the desperate battle waged by the crew against the forces of nature. Frump also brings to life Cusick's internal struggle. He knew what happened to those who spoke out against the system, knew that he too might be stripped of his license and prosecuted for "losing his ship," yet he forged ahead. In a bitter lawsuit with owners of the ship, Cusick emerged victorious. His expose of government inaction led to vital reforms in the laws regarding the safety of ships; his courageous stand places him among the unsung heroes of our time.
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| The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (Paperback) |
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ISBN: 0869809156, Paperback - From $10 BUY
Jane Carruther's superb history of how Kruger National Park came to be. Essential reading for anyone who truly wants to understand Kruger.
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| Wildlife & Warfare: The Life of James Stevenson-Hamilton (Hardcover) |
Jane Carruthers |
ISBN: 0869809865, Hardcover - From $46 BUY
Jane Carruther's masterful biography of one of the most fascinating men in African conservation history.
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| The Lions of Tsavo : Exploring the Legacy of Africa's Notorious Man-Eaters (Hardcover) |
Bruce D. Patterson |
ISBN: 0071363335, Hardcover - 16.47 BUY
Book Description
Deftly written . . . Patterson's book must now be considered the definitive Tsavo lion study... one of the world's leading experts on lions as well as an important conservationist."-- Publishers Weekly Through field research and forensic evidence, a scientist reveals his theory on why two Kenyan lions killed humans and then ate their prey In March 1898, the British began building a bridge over the Tsavo River in East Africa. In nine months, two male lions killed and ate nearly 135 workers, halting construction. After a long hunt Colonel J. H. Patterson killed the lions, which are now on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. As codirector of the Tsavo Research Project, Bruce Patterson has conducted extensive fieldwork throughout the region on these lions. In The Lions of Tsavo , Patterson retells the harrowing story of those bloody nights in Kenya. He presents new forensic evidence on these maneless lions and argues that the man-eating behavior exhibited in 1898 came from the encroachment of human populations on wild habitats. Patterson continues this theory by exploring man's interaction with the changing Kenyan environment, creating a complete, up-to-date, and scientific look behind this intriguing murder mystery
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| The Hunter is Death |
T.V. Bulpin |
ISBN: 0940143089, Hardcover - $249 BUY
An account of the life of professional hunter George Rushby with a chapter on the man-eaters of Tanganyika, said by most to be the most deadly.
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| Ghosts of Tsavo : Stalking the Mystery Lions of East Africa (Paperback |
P. Caputo |
ISBN: 0792241002, Paperback - $9.75 BUY
From Library Journal
In 1898, two maneless male lions killed and devoured 135 Indian and African workers constructing a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. It took Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, the engineer in charge of the project, nine months to hunt and kill the beasts, an ordeal recounted in his 1907 book, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, and later the subject of two films, 1952's Bwana Devil and 1996's The Ghost and the Darkness. A century later, the story of Ghost and Darkness still fascinates and terrifies. Were they just rogue lions, or were they the "missing genetic link" between the prehistoric cave cats who hunted early humans and the modern African lion? Novelist Caputo (The Voyage) seeks answers to this intriguing question as he accompanies two separate expeditions to study the maneless lions of Tsavo. Unfortunately, the resulting book is a frustrating mix of personal travel narrative and scientific speculation, with no definite conclusions. Admitting his ambivalence, Caputo writes: "I feel divided, half of me hungry for scientific truth, the other half seeking to embrace the mythic. It occurs to me that I haven't come close to solving the mystery of Tsavo's lions, probably because my heart hasn't been in it." Still, Caputo's muscular prose vividly captures the beauty and dangers of Africa, and there will be demand because of his name. For larger adventure and natural history collections. Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Caputo is a superb yarn-spinner with a love of adventure and a penchant for philosophizing. A best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, memoirist, and journalist, he's really been around--"at last count, I've lived, worked, traveled, and fought and covered wars in 48 countries on 4 continents"--so it's no surprise to find that Caputo's latest compelling work of nonfiction chronicles a quest on foreign ground. The inspiration for Caputo's African sojourn is found in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the final resting place for the two infamous, maneless, man-eating male lions of Tsavo, an inhospitable and scrubby coastal region in East Africa. These beasts "attained mythic status" by killing and eating 135 railway laborers in 1898, and their cunning descendants continue to take humans as prey and to intrigue scientists who want to know why some lions hunt human beings, why most male lions have manes, and why many male Tsavo lions do not. Caputo relishes hair-raising tales of man-eaters and explicates various theories about them, while entertainingly chronicling his experiences as part of a photography and research safari in Kenya's wildlife reserve. Not only does he excel at evoking the beauty of his surroundings and describing his own sometimes harrowing encounters with wildlife, he also reflects cogently on the consequences of our precipitous decimation of the wild. It turns out that there's nothing all that mysterious about the Tsavo lions: they simply hunt to live. It's our unnecessarily violent species that remains obdurately enigmatic. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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| The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations (Wildlife Behavior and Ecology series) (Paperback) |
George Schaller |
ISBN: 0226736407, Paperback - $35 BUY
The Best of All Lion Books, October 27, 2000
Reviewer: Tim Stoffel (Reno, NV) - See all my reviews
Many books have been written about lions, but 'The Serengeti Lion' is by far the best. Even though it was published nearly 30 years ago, it's information is still considered authorative by many researchers. The fact that it has remained in print all these years-- longer than any other lion book-- attests to it's continuing popularity. Unlike most popular wildlife books, 'The Serengeti Lion' is a scientific paper. It has not been 'watered down' for the masses. Instead, Schaller writes with a an open, very readable style while still presenting the hard information. In fact, it is hard to put this book down. The book is profusely illustrated with drawings and maps. There is also a photos section. Appendices contain numerous detailed tables and charts of lion data, as well as an extensive bibliography. Several short appendices also deal with the lion's co-predators and favorite prey. If you can own but one book about lions, this should be it!
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| Into Africa (Paperback) |
Craig Packer |
ISBN: 0226644308, Paperback - $9.72 BUY
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The author, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the Univ. of Minnesota, gives a vivid, day-by-day view of field biologists at work. In fall 1991 Packer spent seven weeks in Tanzania orienting new assistants to lion research, helping a doctoral student collect fecal samples from lions and baboons and retrieving files from Jane Goodall's house. Twenty years earlier, he had worked with Goodall at Gombe; later, with his wife, Anne Pusey, he studied lions in the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater. Here, he explores the social lives of animals and the threats to their survival. He also tells of coping with vehicle breakdowns, physical exhaustion, personality conflicts and political upheavals. In the tradition of Jane Goodall and George Schaller, Packer has written an engaging account of his African experience.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Here's a book to make the budding wildlife researcher either abandon or reaffirm the calling. Packer describes less than two months of research into the lives and habits of the lion and reveals not only how boring the king of beasts is (lions sleep more than 18 hours a day) but also how less-than-thrilling research can be: for instance, Packer's project involved collecting and analyzing fecal samples. Before tuning out, though, be assured that this is a terrific book. Packer readily admits that Africa has cast its spell on him, and the spell has worked its way into his writing. The rhythms of the continent seem all the while to leap off the pages as Packer describes how the research group had to deal with broken sample bottles (broken while stored in luggage, alas), corrupt local officials, nonworking cars, and various strange and exotic diseases, and also an incident that took place some years before--the kidnapping of researchers by hostile guerrillas. Atop all that, toss in squabbles among the research group, thievery by local citizens hired by the group, and difficulties in obtaining needed materials, and you'll get a good idea of how wildlife researchers really operate out in the field. Commendable on many different levels, this is, above all, an immensely entertaining book. Jon Kartman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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| Death in the Long Grass |
Peter H. Capstick |
ISBN: 0312186134, Hardcover - 16.29 BUY
Capstick's classic. Finely chiseled purple prose about animals that kill and sometimes eat people.
Amazon.com
Hook-and-bullet adventures had by tough guys such as Teddy Roosevelt and Papa Hemingway may be out of favor in these times of eco-awareness, but Peter Hathaway Capstick's account of big-game hunting in Africa remains a classic. With humor, grace, and supreme tension, Capstick takes the reader on safari, eloquently stating his case for blood sport while portraying the intensity of the hunt. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
Few men can say they have known Africa as Peter Hathaway Capstick has know it-- leading safaris through lion country; tracking man-eating leopards along tangled jungle paths; running for cover as fear-maddened elephants stampede in all directions. And of the few who have known this dangerous way of life, fewer still can recount their adventures with the flair of this former professional hunter-turned-writer.
Based on Capstick's own experiences and the personal accounts of his colleagues, Death in the Long Grass portrays the great killers of the African bush-- not only the lion, leopard, and elephant, but the primitive rhino and the crocodile waiting for its unsuspecting prey, the titanic hippo and the Cape buffalo charging like an express train out of control. Capstick was a born raconteur whose colorful descriptions and eye for exciting, authentic detail bring us face to face with some of the most ferocious killers in the world-- underrated killers like the surprisingly brave and cunning hyena, silent killers such as the lightning-fast black mamba snake, collective killers like the wild dog. Readers can lean back in a chair, sip a tall, iced drink, and revel in the kinds of stories Hemingway and Ruark used to hear in hotel bars from Nairobi to Johannesburg, as veteran hunters would tell of what they heard beyond the campfire and saw through the sights of an express rifle.
As thrilling as any novel, as taut and exciting as any adventure story, Death in the Long Grass takes us deep into the heart of darkness to view the Africa that few people have ever seen.
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| White Hunters:The Golden Age of African Safaris (Paperback) |
Bruce Herne |
ISBN: 0805067361, Paperback - $11.05 BUY
Amazon.com
A little over 100 years ago, East Africa was terra incognita to most whites: a land largely unmapped, sparsely settled by Europeans, and teeming with wildlife--from elephants to wildebeest, bongos to rhinos, and all manner of scarifying beasts in between. It was the hunter-adventurer's paradise, and by the early 20th century, a small, lionhearted clan of explorers and big-game hunters began leading safaris there for money. They became the legendary White Hunters of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, men who led manifold adventurers--including royalty, film stars, writers, and millionaires--in pursuit of the world's biggest, most dangerous, and most sought-after game.
White Hunters is a nostalgic and densely-packed history of these men and their adventures, from the turn of the century until the 1970s when politics, a growing population, civil strife, and concern about species destruction intervened. Brian Herne has written a virtual and anecdotal Who's Who of White Hunters, crammed with the details of hundreds of hunts and the dozens of men who led them.
This is no book for the faint-hearted or the politically correct. Despite Herne's insistence that his heroes were the first true conservationists, White Hunters is all about the testosterone-enhanced glory of killing big, beautiful things: "Clary fired, dropping his quarry with a side brain shot. The record-class tusks weighed 159 and 143 pounds each, a gigantic elephant...." On the other hand, a staggering number of hunters died in pursuit of their quarry--mauled, eviscerated, or impaled on the tusks of furious, vengeful beasts.
Not so long ago lions wandered the streets of Nairobi. The politics of big-game hunting aside, the White Hunters' East Africa--wild, mysterious, unspoiled--is vanishing, and Herne has painstakingly documented an era that most readers will likely never know. --Svenja Soldovieri --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
A second-generation Kenyan who has professionally hunted big game for more than 30 years and is an honorary Uganda National Park warden, Herne did exhaustive archival research and conducted countless interviews to produce this encyclopedia of gore and glamour. From roughly 1890 to 1970, American and European aristocrats, movie stars and business tycoons converged on East Africa, hiring professional white hunters to lead them on lengthy, luxurious shooting expeditions. Theodore Roosevelt's 1909 safari lasted for months and employed 500 porters. The early generation of white hunters set the pace for a hard-drinking, bed-hopping lifestyle. Later, Bror Blixen, Isak Dinesen and Denys Finch-Hatton carried on just as flamboyantly as their screen counterparts in Out of Africa. In turn-of-the-century Nairobi, inebriated ladies rode their ponies up steps into bars. But the dangers were real, and Herne details various narrow escapes and deaths by mauling. Typically colorful is the story about the filming of King Solomon's Mines, during which a bull elephant rushed the cameras and was stopped by a bullet. The relieved crew and actors posed for pictures on the animal, which disappeared later that day, never to be found again. Heavier on anecdotes than on overview, Herne's book skips discreetly over all the cultural and political ironies of Europeans coming to Africa to shoot at its natural resources. It will, however, reward armchair hunters with a rich portrait of a magnificent landscape, its animal inhabitants and some of its most reckless human interlopers. (June)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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| Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (Paperback) |
David Quammen |
ISBN: 0393326098, Paperback - $10.85 BUY
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
As the subtitle of David Quammen's Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind suggests, his fascination centers on those animals that raise human "awareness of being meat," and he likens the historic impact of these predators to modern-day car accidents: sudden, unexpected, life-changing. While his research is extraordinary--encompassing extensive field work and diverse reading on the science and lore surrounding predatory animals--Quammen's peripatetic mind jumps from history to psychology to ecology and from Africa to Russia to Australia, sometimes leaving his readers without a base camp to recuperate during the breath-taking journey.
His research on the lions of Gir forest in India, on the crocodiles of Northern Australia, on the bears of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, and on the Siberian tigers of Far East Russia finds animals held in constant tension, encircled by every-expanding human populations. But Quammen doesn't oversimplify the conflicts. Often, in fact, Quammen has so much to say about competing interests that he makes several false starts before finding his true theme. Recalling his reading in the l970s literature on crocodiles in Africa, for example, Quammen abruptly jumps to a failed farming and reintroduction project begun in India before finally settling into the investigation of Northern Australia's Crocodylus Park.
These changes in geography, time, and perspective can be disorienting in a book that is already complicated by its several competing approaches. Adding to the abundance, Quammen explores human population growth projections, images of the Leviathan in the Bible, keystone species theory, the Muskrat hypothesis (the idea that the "wastage parts" of an animal species are the ones most likely to suffer predation), and the 1994 discovery of the Chauvet cave paintings. Yet Quammen, author of The Soing of the Dodo moves with such ease through this wilderness of ideas that even the most difficult material becomes palatable. --Patrick O’Kelley
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| Man The Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution (Hardcover) |
by Donna Hart, Robert W. Sussman |
ISBN: 0813339367, Hardcover - $20.37 BUY
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Contrary to the familiar image of the aggressive, spear-wielding "caveman," our hominid ancestors were more hunted than hunters, more preyed upon than slayers of large predators, contend wildlife conservationist Hart and anthropologist Sussman. The authors note that as anthropologists and primatologists have studied various primate species in the African and Asian rainforests, many myths have been dispelled about how aggressive these primates (who resemble our ancestors) were and how they reacted to predation. And as more early hominid fossils have been discovered, researchers have come to realize that they were small enough to make a tasty snack for a pack of large hyenas. One skull bears twin holes that match exactly the fangs of a leopard; another displays scratches that suggest the victim was carried off by a very large bird of prey. Modern-day humans are still preyed upon in many places: mountain lions have ambushed joggers in California, and in southern Africa, the crowned harp-eagle occasionally carries off a small child. The authors maintain that our need to socialize stems from early hominids' improved odds of survival when they banded together against predators. Some readers may raise an eyebrow at the suggestion that our predilection for a beautiful scenic view evolved from our ancestors' scanning the African grasslands for danger, but the authors' novel proposals merit serious consideration. B&w illus. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In an agile, knowledgeable presentation, the authors contest a popular conception about human evolution: that ancestral hominids were hunters. Hart and Sussman, anthropology professors, think that the support for that idea is flimsy. However, its advocates, such as Louis Leakey, have been influential. Leakey insisted that humans were not "cat food." We were, demur the authors, and food for bears, hyenas, snakes, and eagles, too. To make their case, which eminent paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall extols in a preface as "the first comprehensive synthesis of the information available about predation on humans," Hart and Sussman marshal both fossils and behavioral studies of living primates. The authors' prose is wryly irreverent, as if intended to keep a lecture class awake and interested. Even readers who instinctively shy away from science would enjoy reading this book. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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| The Beast in the Garden |
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ISBN: 0393326349, Paperback - $9.72 BUY
Just in case you think America does not have similar conflicts between conservation of wildlife and human life, read "Beast in the Garden." One of my favorites. Exceptionally well-written and researched story about the probems with cougars and humans in Colorado and elsewhere in the sttes.
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The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America (Paperback)
by David Baron "Snow dusted the mountains like confectioner's sugar..." (more)
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In 1991, in Idaho Springs, Colo., a small town not far from Boulder, a young jogger was killed and partially eaten by a mountain lion. Although people were horrified, biologist Michael Sanders and naturalist Jim Halfpenny were not surprised. Since 1988 they had been studying the mountain lions that were invading backyards in the Boulder area in increasing numbers and had concluded that, contrary to the accepted wisdom that these lions don't attack people, the big cats were indeed stalking humans in search of a good meal. In an engrossing book that reads like a true crime thriller, Baron, a science and environmental writer, follows the advance of mountain lions around Boulder as if they were serial killers, building tension as he leads up to the killing. There were plenty of warnings. Numerous homeowners saw lions in their yards, dogs were maimed or eaten and a girl was attacked but survived. Sanders and Halfpenny tried to convince the wildlife-loving Boulderites that a tragedy was about to occur, but people believed they could coexist peacefully with the lions, and the Colorado Division of Wildlife was also determined to leave the animals alone. Even after Scott Lancaster, the Idaho Springs jogger, was killed, area residents refused to endorse killing the big cats that moved into their neighborhoods. Baron is not in favor of killing unwanted lions, but in this timely book he warns that as people continue to displace wild animals from their habitats, they have to change the way they interact with them and be more realistic about romantic notions of wilderness. Illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
An award-winning science journalist for National Public Radio, Baron examines the complex relationship between humans and cougars, both in the past, when the predators were nearly hunted into extinction, and in the present, as more homes are built in wilderness areas and more people find themselves face-to-face with predators who not only have no fear of humans but also have discovered in human habitats new sources of food. Baron uses the environmentally sensitive city of Boulder, Colorado, as a microcosm of the cougar-human conflict, which came to a head during the 1980s when mountain lions were killing house pets and threatening children and adults. Although Baron can't resist playing up the sensational aspects of cougar attacks, he does perceptively dissect both sides of the impassioned debate these terrifying confrontations engender, revealing how naive and unrealistic the live-and-let-live approach can be, and how easy it is to take the kill-the-miserable-beasts response to unreasonable extremes. For more on man-eaters, see David Quammen's Monster of God [BKL Jl 03] and Phillip Caputo's Ghosts of Tsavo (2002). Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --
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| Natural Enemies : People-Wildlife Conflict in Anthropological Perspective (European Association of Social Anthropologists) |
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ISBN: 0415224411, Paperback - $39.95 BUY
Book Description
Wild animals and pests raid crops, attack livestock, and can threaten people. Conflicts with wildlife are widespread, assume a variety of forms, and elicit a range of human responses. For the anthropologists, people-wildlife conflicts readily invite symbolic analysis. This volume examines people-wildlife conflicts in Europe, Africa and Asia from an anthropological perspective.
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