The Man-eaters of Tsavo - Softcover

Patterson, John Henry

3.93

3,963 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 146107830X ISBN 13: 9781461078302

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011

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THE MAN-EATERS OF TSAVO is a great book recounting the story of a pair of man-eating predator lions that the author and his team killed, known as the Tsavo Man-eaters.

Following the death of the lions, the book tells many stories concerning local wildlife (including other lions), local tribes, the discovery of the man-eaters' cave, and various hunting expeditions. There is also good advice to sports-men visiting Africa.

Several publications about and studies of the man-eating lions of Tsavo have been inspired by Patterson’s account. The book has been adapted to film three times - a monochrome British film of the 1950's, a 1952 3-D film titled Bwana Devil, and a 1996 color version called The Ghost and the Darkness, where Val Kilmer played the daring engineer who hunts down the lions of Tsavo.

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Review:

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.

From the Back Cover:

Originally published in 1907, this book records the harrowing true story of what really happened at Tsavo in 1898. If you are interested in the Tsavo Maneaters, this book is a must read! One of the first works on the subject of man-eating lions by someone with first-hand experience, it details a series of attacks on the Indian workers building the Mombasa to Uganda railway in 1898–1899. It was Patterson's task to rid the project of some man-eaters who had decimated the missing, but the discovery of the bodies soon dispelled that notion. Over the next few months, the lions had their pick of the workers along the railway line, and various traps and vigils all failed to work, until one of the lions was shot by Patterson, who had waited all night at the top of a 12 feet-high structure of sticks for the opportunity. The second male was shot soon after, but between them these two lions had accounted for over 100 workers and natives, "of whom no official record was kept."
After killing the infamous lions, Colonel Patterson had their skins made into rugs and they resided in his home in England after his return from East Africa. In 1907, he wrote "The Man Eaters of Tsavo", which was a hit, and is considered today to be a literary classic. It is still to this day the most extraordinary account of man-eating animals ever recorded!

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