Plain talking: An unforgettable portrait of Africas wildlife crisis

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, combines Peter Beards salient text and remarkable photographs to document the overpopulation and starvation of tens of thousands of elephants, rhinos, and hippos in Kenyas Tsavo lowlands and Uganda parklands in the 1960s and 70s.

Researched and compiled over two decades, Beard offers a powerful and poignant testimony to the damage done by human intervention in Africa. His own images and texts are supplemented by historical photographs of, and writings 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.

Marking the 50th anniversary of its first publication, TASCHEN now republishes in a limited edition of 5,000 copies, with an updated foreword by internationally renowned travel and fiction writer Paul Theroux. 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.