The End of the Game

"The deeper the white man went into Africa, the faster the life flowed out of it, off the plains and out of the bush...vanishing in acres of trophies and hides and carcasses." - Peter Beard

A landmark publication on Africa, The End of the Game combines Peter Beard's salient text and remarkable photographs to document the overpopulation and starvation of tens of thousands of elephants, rhinos, and hippos in Kenya's Tsavo lowlands and Uganda parklands in the 1960s and '70s.

Researched and compiled over two decades, and updated several times since with new material, this is Beard's essential book-a powerful and poignant testimony to the damage done by human intervention in Africa. His own images and writings are supplemented by historical photographs of, and quotations from, the enterprisers, explorers, missionaries, and big-game hunters whose quest for adventure and "progress" were to change the face of a continent: Theodore Roosevelt, Frederick Courteney Selous, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), Philip Percival, J. A. Hunter, Ernest Hemingway, and J. H. Patterson.

This new edition includes an interview with conservationist Dr. Esmond Bradley Martin, as well as essays from previous editions by renowned writer Paul Theroux and ecologist Dr. Richard M. Laws, and contributions to the afterword by agronomist Dr. Norman Borlaug. Touching on such themes as distance from nature, density and stress, and loss of common sense, this seminal portrait is as resonant today, amid growing environmental crises, as it was a half century ago.

"The most poignant are the ones of decomposing elephants where, over time, as they disintegrate, the bones form magnificent sculpture-sculpture which is not just abstract form but has all the memory traces of life, despair, and futility."
- Francis Bacon on Peter Beard's photographs