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Zara's Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Beard
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy Used: $3.32
You Save: $23.63 (88%)
New (29) from $15.12
Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 203440
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.7 x 0.9
ISBN: 0679426590
Dewey Decimal Number: 967.604092
EAN: 9780679426592
ASIN: 0679426590
Publication Date: November 23, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: ex library book , BUT IN VERY GOOD CONDITION!!!!
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Product Description
From adventurer, explorer, photographer, writer, pied piper Peter Beard—eleven irresistible tales, told to his daughter in his tented encampment at Hog Ranch, Kenya, about life, about living, about Africa.
He writes of the East African hills he came to know so well over four decades, where time slows to infinity in a great bottomless, bottle green underwater world . . . about Nairobi in the 1950s, still a quaint, eccentric pioneer town, full of characters of all stripes and tribes, where rhinoceros roamed the streets and local residents went to the movies in pajamas.
He writes of the camp he built twelve miles outside of Nairobi so that he would never be off safari, a forty-acre patch of bush called Hog Ranch (abutting Karen Blixen’s plantation), named for the families of warthogs who wandered into camp, a camp populated with waterbuck, suni, dik-diks, leopard, giraffe, and occasionally lion and buffalo.
In “Big Pig at Hog Ranch,” Beard tells the story of Thaka (translation from the Kikuyu: “handsome stud”), Hog Ranch’s number-one, fearsome, 300-pound warthog, who came into camp and dropped to the ground happy for a vigorous tummy rub, and who one night, “lying in his favorite position, munching on corn and barbeque chicken,” was encroached upon by a bristly haired, wild-looking boar hog. All three hundred pounds of Thaka exploded straight at the hairy intruder, the two brutish, bony heads crashing together thundering through the camp and Peter witnessed the unleashed power—the bullish strength—of the wild pig . . .
In “Roping Rhino,” Beard tells of his first job in Africa, rounding up and relocating rhinos for the Kenya Game Department with his cohort and neighbor, a weather-beaten native of Old Kenya who thrived on danger and refused to bathe—and of the enormous silver-backed rhino bull that became their Moby Dick . . .
He writes of his quest to photograph overpopulated and habitat-destroying elephants for Life magazine on the eve of Kenya’s independence . . . of his close encounter with the legendary man-eating lions of “Starvo” (descendants of the famed beasts rumored to be immune to bullets, who in the late nineteenth century halted the construction of the Mombasa railroad, devouring railroad workers and snatching sleeping passengers from their Pullman berths in the dead of night to make a meal of them), who charged the author, “coming in slow motion, like a bullet train erupting out of a tunnel, soundless, like an ancient force.”
He tells of his round-the-clock adventure tracking and studying crocodiles with a game warden–biologist at Lake Rudolf, a tale that begins with one crewmember being grabbed from behind by a ten-foot crocodile and another doing battle with an almost prehistoric monster fish—a 200-pound Great Nile perch! . . . and he writes of the final wildlife encounter that ended his safari days, an incident that proved Karen Blixen’s motto: “Be bold, be bold . . . be not too bold.”
Zara’s Tales confirms to our constant surprise and delight that “nothing out of the ordinary happens. It’s just Africa, after all.”
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| Customer Reviews:
 Zara's Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa March 30, 2008
This book is a fantastic journey and inspires the adventuresome spirit. A beautiful sharing of a unique life.
 bruised and flawed; but poignant and accomplished July 9, 2007
Unlike other reviewers of this work, I found the book to be an interesting and poignant offering from a man known mainly as an adventurer/photographer/artist - not a literary guru. I'd rather read the imperfect but insightful works of an iconoclast who offers his uncensored impressions of an exotic land than some polished, politically correct and literary highbrow piece. Whether you are into his insightful and colorful words, his stunning and captivating images, or neither one, one is easily awed at the accomplishment of bringing so much attention to this land.
Peter Beard is one-of-a-kind, and this little controversial book is merely one among many of his works that manage to successfully step outside of the mainstream; and deftly merge artistic sensibility (and a unique vision for beauty) with raw, edgy curiosity about life.
 end of the game or end of his game? October 5, 2005
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Amusing at times but mostly clunky and graceless, Beard pushes readers to imbibe his contradictory opinions and attitudes and his style can be quite suffocating.
 Landscape: CLOSED December 31, 2004
30 out of 38 found this review helpful
Renowned photographer Peter Beard's Zara's Tales (2004), a book of airy African anecdotes ostensibly written for Beard's young daughter, is clearly intended for "children of all ages," but its best audience will probably be found among adolescents with an interest in the exotic and a talent for discerning the wheat from the chafe.
Unattractively, the narrative is reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne at his worst in both style and tone, being by turns smug, sardonic, condescending, patronizing, and both mocking and self-parodying. The overall impression the text leaves is that there is very little actual content to Zara's Tales, and what little exists is buried under the author's labored and indulgent prose.
The book is also overloaded at every turn with whimsical baby talk that frequently approaches high camp: a half page of text about a young rhino offers readers expressions like "delicious yum-yums," "spoiled brats," "bouncy baby," "tooth-some sweets," and "bonbon handouts." Not even young children will find this phraseology less than cloying.
Such language is in doubly poor taste since the brief story concludes with the rhino biting off the finger of a "neophyte ranger," while Beard's friend and comrade, Ken Randall, who Beard refers to as "a lunatic," rolls on the ground, "shaking and gasping, tears of laughter streaming down his face." In fact, there's little point to the anecdote except that Randall finds the tragic accident hilarious, a message many parents and educators will probably find revolting.
A photo montage of dead and decaying elephant corpses, reprinted from Beard's The End of the Game (1965), while obliquely underscoring the plight of African wildlife, only further throws into question exactly what audience Zara's Tales is intended for.
The book is physically handsome, but suffers slightly from being over-decorated in Beard's crowded, sentimental style. The author's photographs of the African landscape, peoples, and wildlife are entrancing and dramatic in most cases, and thus deserve finer narrative support than the thin, disappointing text provides. By the last chapter, the book suggests nothing so much as a private family project that has somehow found its way into the public market; many adults mistakenly believe their personal family musings have a broader objective appeal, and Zara's Tales, like a cartridge of tedious holiday slides, is no exception.
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