THE END OF THE GAME

Text and photographs by peter Hill Beard.

First English edition: 256 pages, frontispiece, map, portraits, profusely illustrated with colour and black and white photographs, booksellers ticket on the front paste-down end paper, green cloth titled gilt on the spine, a good copy in a worn dust jacket.

The origins, history, and prospects of big game in Africa Researched, photographed, and compiled over 20 years, Peter Beard's 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 Beard's work--Theodore 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 Beard's 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, Beard's studies of elephant and hippo population dynamics document the inevitable overpopulation and starvation of tens of thousands of elephants and rhinos. https://books.google.co.za/books/about/The_End_of_the_Game.html