Description:
Just about the time that famous lion hunters like Ernest Hemingway and Denys Finch Hatton were meeting their ends, a young Portuguese boy and his family landed on the coast of Mozambique to establish a farm in the Portuguese colony. It wasn't long before Adelino Serras Pires cut his hunting teeth, on a hunt for a pride of man-eating lions who had been victimizing a local population made vulnerable by an epidemic of sleeping sickness. Soon, The smell of the bush after the rains ... the feel of a campfire's warmth after an exhausting day spent following elephant spoor on foot, the sound of lion in concert on a kill, and the taste of guinea fowl over the coals had turned me into a cultural hybrid with a permanent longing for change, for wild places and challenges. Pires would turn his passion into a promotion of the safari hunting industry in Mozambique, leading European aristocracy, heads of state, astronauts, wine barons, and other members of the international elite into the untouched bush in pursuit of "the big five." He would also become one of the most controversial figures in safari hunting. An outspoken man with an indomitable will, he fought the Frelimo guerrillas who engulfed the country while also roundly criticizing Portuguese rule, ultimately becoming the enemy of both. After Mozambique's independence, Pires jumped from Angola to Rhodesia to Zaire setting up hunting shop, only to be forced out as independence movements and superpowers battled. Just when permanency seemed possible in Tanzania, he found himself a hostage in a horrifying game of betrayal, torture, and international collusion. Pires tells his life story with the intensity with which he lived his life and with the fury and bitterness of a man who has lost all he loved. Whether or not you agree with his assertion that trophy hunting is the best way to preserve African wildlife ("if it pays, it stays"), it's impossible not to be deeply affected by his portrait of an Africa torn apart by the inside and out, or to feel nostalgia for an Africa now destroyed. --Lesley Reed
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