From Library Journal
In 1898, two maneless male lions killed and devoured 135 Indian and African workers constructing a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. It took Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, the engineer in charge of the project, nine months to hunt and kill the beasts, an ordeal recounted in his 1907 book, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, and later the subject of two films, 1952's Bwana Devil and 1996's The Ghost and the Darkness. A century later, the story of Ghost and Darkness still fascinates and terrifies. Were they just rogue lions, or were they the "missing genetic link" between the prehistoric cave cats who hunted early humans and the modern African lion? Novelist Caputo (The Voyage) seeks answers to this intriguing question as he accompanies two separate expeditions to study the maneless lions of Tsavo. Unfortunately, the resulting book is a frustrating mix of personal travel narrative and scientific speculation, with no definite conclusions. Admitting his ambivalence, Caputo writes: "I feel divided, half of me hungry for scientific truth, the other half seeking to embrace the mythic. It occurs to me that I haven't come close to solving the mystery of Tsavo's lions, probably because my heart hasn't been in it." Still, Caputo's muscular prose vividly captures the beauty and dangers of Africa, and there will be demand because of his name. For larger adventure and natural history collections. Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Caputo is a superb yarn-spinner with a love of adventure and a penchant for philosophizing. A best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, memoirist, and journalist, he's really been around--"at last count, I've lived, worked, traveled, and fought and covered wars in 48 countries on 4 continents"--so it's no surprise to find that Caputo's latest compelling work of nonfiction chronicles a quest on foreign ground. The inspiration for Caputo's African sojourn is found in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the final resting place for the two infamous, maneless, man-eating male lions of Tsavo, an inhospitable and scrubby coastal region in East Africa. These beasts "attained mythic status" by killing and eating 135 railway laborers in 1898, and their cunning descendants continue to take humans as prey and to intrigue scientists who want to know why some lions hunt human beings, why most male lions have manes, and why many male Tsavo lions do not. Caputo relishes hair-raising tales of man-eaters and explicates various theories about them, while entertainingly chronicling his experiences as part of a photography and research safari in Kenya's wildlife reserve. Not only does he excel at evoking the beauty of his surroundings and describing his own sometimes harrowing encounters with wildlife, he also reflects cogently on the consequences of our precipitous decimation of the wild. It turns out that there's nothing all that mysterious about the Tsavo lions: they simply hunt to live. It's our unnecessarily violent species that remains obdurately enigmatic. Donna Seaman
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Book Description

In 1898, two hauntingly elusive maneless lions killed and ate 140 workers who were building a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. These seemingly invincible man-eaters literally stopped the British Empire in its tracks during their year-long reign of terror. But the bloody exploits of these animals, immortalized in John Patterson’s 1907 book, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, and two feature films, Bwana Devil in 1952 and The Ghost and the Darkness in 1996, are only part of the story.