Mbogo, the Black Death, which manifests itself in the African Cape buffalo, now stood less than 12 feet away from me. The cow and calf were too close for me to have time to be scared. I would only have time to react on instinct if they came closer. That is the type of excitement that every hunter dreams of and it is still possible in Africa today. It is also one that I was fortunate enough to experience without any permanent ill effects. Eighty percent or more of American hunters think that Africa is too expensive or off-limits and that they will never have a chance to experience their own, up-close-and-personal adventure in the African bushveld. Safari 101 proves just the opposite. Safari 101 is written for the hunter that has always considered Africa out of reach, someone who has a spark of desire just waiting to be fanned into a flame. American hunters spend thousands of dollars every year hunting at home. Almost none of them know that, for the price of a guided elk hunt in the western United States, they can take an African Safari. The myths of being too expensive and too difficult are firmly entrenched in many hunters minds. Safari 101 has forty-six hints dispersed throughout 11 chapters and proves these myths false. Personal experiences are used to illustrate the value of each hint and to make each one easy to remember. Safari 101 takes the author's experiences, and what he learned from professional hunters and outfitters, and puts the information in a logical progression that is entertaining as well as informative. Safari 101 will help fan the spark into a flame.

A history of the African safari from its first major expedition in 1836 to the adventures of modern guides shares the experiences of such individuals as Beryl Markham, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ernest Hemingway, in an account that evaluates the ethical dilemma faced by hunter-conservationists as well as the African bush's role in weapons development, transportation, and art. Reprint.

As thrilling as any novel, as taut and exciting as any adventure story, Peter Hathaway Capstick’s Death in the Long Grass takes us deep into the heart of darkness to view Africa through the eyes of one of the most renowned professional hunters. Few men can say they have known Africa as Capstick has known 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 Grassportrays 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 hunting 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.

A groundbreaking investigation of Western conceptions of Africa.

Denys Finch Hatton was adored by women and idolized by men. A champion of Africa, legendary for his good looks, his charm, and his prowess as a soldier, lover, and hunter, Finch Hatton inspired Karen Blixen to write the unforgettable stories in Out of Africa. Now esteemed British biographer Sara Wheeler tells the truth about this extraordinarily charismatic adventurer. Born to an old aristocratic family that had gambled away most of its fortune, Finch Hatton grew up in a world of effortless elegance and boundless power. Tall and graceful, with the soul of a poet and an athlete’s relaxed masculinity, he became a hero without trying at Eton and Oxford. In 1910, searching for novelty and danger, Finch Hatton arrived in British East Africa and fell in love–with a continent, with a landscape, with a way of life that was about to change forever. Wheeler brilliantly conjures the mystical beauty of Kenya at a time when teeming herds of wild animals roamed unmolested across pristine savannah. No one was more deeply attuned to this beauty than Finch Hatton–and no one more bitterly mourned its passing when the outbreak of World War I engulfed the region in a protracted, bloody guerrilla conflict. Finch Hatton was serving as a captain in the Allied forces when he met Karen Blixen in Nairobi and embarked on one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century. With delicacy and grace, Wheeler teases out truth from fiction in the liaison that Blixen herself immortalized in Out of Africa. Intellectual equals, bound by their love for the continent and their inimitable sense of style, Finch Hatton and Blixen were genuine pioneers in a land that was quickly being transformed by violence, greed, and bigotry. Ever restless, Finch Hatton wandered into a career as a big-game hunter and became an expert bush pilot; his passion that led to his affair with the notoriously unconventional aviatrix Beryl Markham. But Markham was no more able to hold him than Blixen had been. Mesmerized all his life by the allure of freedom and danger, Finch Hatton was, writes Wheeler, “the open road made flesh.” In painting a portrait of an irresistible man, Sara Wheeler has beautifully captured the heady glamour of the vanished paradise of colonial East Africa. In Too Close to the Sun she has crafted a book that is as ravishing as its subject.