DEATH IN THE LONG GRASS

by Peter Hathaway Capstick ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1977

American safari guide Capstick gave up a soft career in the States as a customers' man in the securities brokerage business--and became an apprentice jaguar hunter in Central and South America. After many related and adventurous jobs, he gained his full professional hunter's license for several African countries and now spends six months a year hunting and six back home in Florida writing for magazines. Capstick can write--a bit like Richard Burton flailing you with the mock-Promethean vocabulary of a macho T. E. Lawrence who daily faces losing his liver to wild dogs, hyenas, black mambas, crazed elephants, enraged leopards, foaming water buffalo, blind rhinos, snappish crocs, horrible hippos (Capstick detests them), or even man-hungry lions, This is a book about death and how the beasts of the jungle go about removing you from their land. Capstick--who also detests the wonderful world of Walt Disney--sets out to scare you to death by stuffing you down a croc or into a hippo's maw, or by having you sit on a latrine seat cover with a mambo in it, and he half succeeds. His long justification of professional hunting will not make conservationists happy (though he is a conservationist, of sorts), but few readers will come away from this bloodbath without a new respect for the lethal horrors in the long African grass.

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1977

ISBN: 0312186134

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1977

Categories: NONFICTION