Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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

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.

I found this book to be a disappointment. I hunt in Africa (not South Africa) and am fortunate enough to return on return on a yearly basis. I do not consider myself an expert on Africa by any means, and indeed, I wonder if anyone can really become an expert on so vast a place as Sub-Saharan Africa, an area only slightly smaller than the 48 contiguous United States. This book has a disorganized feel as though it was rushed into print on short notice. It is hard to understand the point the author is trying to make. Africa has components that can be very dangerous at times, although no more dangerous than many other parts of the world including the US. The reality is that everyone tends to manage the dangers they are familiar with as best they can. This is no less true for Africa than for the US and the other Western nations. Many thousands die on the US highways every year, but people by the millions don't think twice about risking death by using them to get where they need to go. The same is true for Africa. If the indigenous Africans need to risk predation or similar dangers to get to where they need to go, they take the risk. Most people around the world manage risk quite well in their daily lives. A few behave recklessly, and they are the ones that tend to get into trouble. As the author finally points out at the end of the book, there are ways to cross Kruger National park without being killed by lions, but there is always a risk of death, just as there is always a risk of death in highly developed industrial societies. (Currently, the real risk of death in Africa is from AIDS.) Finally, his discussions about firearms show a real lack of knowledge. Someone knowledgeable about firearms, and organization of the written word, should have gone over this book before publication.

Not in the same league as Paterson's "Man Eaters of Tsavo" or Corbetts "Man Eaters of Kumaon". Needs more narration on actual Man Eating incidents in the Kruger National Park. Some of the Kruger incidents are old and I have read them in other books.