The Man-Eaters of Eden: Life and Death in Kruger National Park [Hardcover]

Robert Frump (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2006

It was the winter of 1902; South African park ranger Harry Wolhuter was on horseback, patrolling the area for poachers at Kruger National Park. Little did he know, he was also being stalked. Out of nowhere, two huge male lions pounced on Harry's horse, knocking the man to the ground. The horse ran off, leaving Harry to fend for himself. One of the lions lunged at him--piercing deep into his flesh and bones--and began to drag him far into the jungle to finish him off. Harry's only hope for survival was the small sheath he carried on his right hip, and he could not reach it easily. With a few quick stabs to the massive beast's chest, he waited and prayed for the best. Miraculously, after spending hours in a tree--drifting in and out of consciousness--with only his terrier standing between him and the second lion, he survived the attack and lived to tell his story.

But others have not been so lucky at Kruger National Park. Today, Mozambican refugees are being eaten alive in great numbers as they attempt to walk the Kruger, yet no one seems to know about these massacres, and nothing is being done to stop them. More lion attacks have been documented in the past year than ever before.

And so begins the investigative journey of journalist Robert Frump. In July of 2002, his plane touched down on the airfields west of Kruger, and what he discovered was beyond belief. The Man-Eaters of Eden uncovers the simple truth, that more people are eaten by lions today, than ever before.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

According to Frump, lions in South Africa's Kruger National Park today "are killing people three times as often as fifteen years ago"; they are attacking, killing and eating refugees fleeing into the country from Mozambique by way of the park. Expanding on an article he wrote for Men's Journal, Frump (Until The Sea Shall Free Them) offers a deftly written study of the park's 2,000 lions and the refugees, and "the crossed paths the two species traveled." Frump delivers a dispassionate examination exploring how "efforts by conservationists to preserve lions are directly resulting in the loss of human life" due to an inadequate governmental response to the continuing refugee crisis. He balances first-person accounts of his travels in the Kruger and his attempts to literally walk in the same path as the refugees with sharp and fascinating portraits of Africans such as John Kohza, one of the first of what Frump calls "the modern surge of refugees through Kruger" in the 1970s. Kohza's flight from the horrors of Mozambican famine and persecution is one of the book's emotional high points. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

When on a safari in South Africa, journalist and author (Until the Sea Shall Free Them, 2002) Frump began to hear rumors of lions attacking and eating people, mostly refugees from Mozambique, in Kruger National Park. Kruger is on the border between South Africa and Mozambique, and its remote location presents the best way for the poor to enter South Africa, seeking both safety and jobs. But the emigres must also run the gauntlet of Kruger's 2,000 lions. As Frump tells the story, the roles of heroes and villains blur: the victims are illegal aliens and therefore not "heroes," the bad guys are lions just doing what comes naturally to them, so they are not really "villains," and the park's rangers are caught in the middle as they try to protect one of the world's great parks despite its one unintended, lethal consequence. Frump's intention was to examine the problem of lions and refugees dispassionately, and in this he succeeds. The narrative style encompasses solutions for solving the problem. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: The Lyons Press (August 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592288928
• ISBN-13: 978-1592288922
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,099,709 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert R.Frump is a nationally recognized journalist who won several major awards while a journalist and investigative reporter at The Philadephia Inquirer. He grew up in the small farm town of Paxton, Ill, graduated from the University of Illinois and received a master's degree from Northwestern University -- all in journalism. He received, with Tim Dwyer, the George Polk Award, for his reporting on unsafe U.S. ships, and the Gerald Loeb Award for National Business Reporting. He was also a member of an Inquirer task force that won the Pulitzer Prize. He is married to Suzanne Saxton-Frump. They have two daughters, Sarah, a student at Brown University, and Caitlin Dean, a software engineer. He is the former managing editor of The Journal of Commerce.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars God's In Frump's Details, October 31, 2006

By 

S. Ragognetti "smrags" (Connecticut) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Man-Eaters of Eden: Life and Death in Kruger National Park (Hardcover)

I found this to be a most intriguing read. At the very start of the book Frump gets your heart racing with the frightening tale of a corpse-spotting in Kruger. Even more gruesome lion-kill accounts create the intermittent suspense that boils up at just the right times throughout this book. That suspense is held together tightly with an honest and well-researched history of the state of game in African park and the plight of the African people who, victims of endless war, must unfairly confront Kruger's lions--the perfect killing machines. What's more, Frump helps the reader grapple with the natural guilt that comes from enjoying the suspense in this tragedy by tackling the sad moral quandry: lion or man. And perhaps best of all, it's a superbly crafted tale that is told in Frump's crips writing style.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A natural history of the park's two thousand lions and the plight of reguees who are their prey., December 13, 2006

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Man-Eaters of Eden: Life and Death in Kruger National Park (Hardcover)

Mozambican refugees are being eaten alive en masse as they attempt to walk across South Africa's Kruger National Park - home to the notorious man eating lions that are a well-kept secret outside the area. Journalist Robert Frump journeyed to the region in 2002 in search of their story and found a complex social and political mileau instead of the simple tale he had anticipated. THE MAN-EATERS OF EDEN thus becomes as much a story of politics and regional issues as it is a natural history of the park's two thousand lions and the plight of reguees who are their prey.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars OF DEFINITE VALUE, November 3, 2006

By 

LionLady "Pam" (California) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Man-Eaters of Eden: Life and Death in Kruger National Park (Hardcover)

This is an intriguing book because it's many-layered. On the one hand, it's certainly about man-eating lions. On the other, it's about waves of refugees willing to risk those lions on foot, unarmed and in the middle of the African night, to escape war and poverty. And the question of what you do, officially, in a famous wildlife preserve when your most charismatic tourist attractions are regularly killing and eating desperate political and economic refugees. Answer: You cover it up. You make sure your own tourists are safe (?) and you cover up the rest. There are no clear villains in this book- not the lions, who are just doing what lions do; not the refugees, looking for a viable life; not even the Kruger officials, who have no taste for the wholesale slaughter of animals in their charge. There is one hero, who does what he can in a refreshingly non-official, commonsensical way to help the refugees better their chances of staying alive.

I enjoyed Frump's style and narrative persona; he is no hero himself, out of his element and as scared of lions as anyone else. He's tantalized by the idea of crossing Kruger on foot and at night himself, but honestly relieved when he can find no one willing to guide him. He doesn't offer any easy answers and few judgements.

It's also humbling to realize how utterly helpless human beings still are when separated from our technology and set afoot in the dark among predators we must have known intimately for hundreds of thousands of years.