Peter Beard. The End of the Game

The groundbreaking coffee-table book 'Peter Beard. The End of the Game' by Taschen is an indispensable historical document on the crisis of African nature. The book reveals a continent exhausted by human ideas of progress. Using two decades of Peter Beard's photographs of elephants, rhinos and hippos, it captures not only what has been lost, but also what these losses reflect in us. What once felt like a warning now feels inevitable. In a time of accelerating ecological collapse, this work asks not what we have lost, but who we are becoming.

"The deeper the white man penetrated into Africa, the faster life flowed out of it, off the plains and out of the bush ... disappearing into vast fields of trophies, skins and cadavers." - Peter Beard

The book "The End of the Game" combines Peter Beard's striking 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's parklands in the 1960s and 1970s.

Researched and compiled over two decades and updated several times since with new material, this coffee-table book is Beard's essential work - a powerful and moving testimony to the damage done by human intervention in Africa. His own images and writings are complemented by historical photographs of and quotations from the entrepreneurs, explorers, missionaries and gamekeepers whose quest for adventure and "progress" would 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 author Paul Theroux and ecologist Dr. Richard M. Laws, and afterword contributions by agronomist Dr. Norman Borlaug. This groundbreaking portrait, which addresses themes of distance from nature, density and stress, and loss of sanity, is as timely today, amid growing environmental crises, as it was half a century ago.

Specifications
Title: Peter Beard. The End of the Game
Publisher: Taschen
Format: 245 x 272 x 60 mm
Size: , 304 pages
Weight: 1.63 kg
Language: English
Material: Hardcover
ISBN: 9783754402719
Release: April 29, 2026

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