A slender book about hunting and gathering that should be useful for those preparing to go out in the field and delightful...
A husband-and-wife team shares methods and recipes for those who want to catch, grow, and cook their own food.
The Ingrams (New River Guide, 2015, etc.) outline multiple benefits to living the locavore lifestyle, the least of which is saving money—although it will probably do that too. Mainly they want to eat healthier food that’s not laced with pesticides, antibiotics, and hormones and enjoy the closer ties to nature that living off the land engenders. In short chapters, the authors give the basics: hunting for and butchering deer, turkey, squirrel, rabbit, and grouse; freshwater fishing for largemouth and smallmouth bass, trout, and panfish; gathering wild fruits and nuts, from pawpaws and persimmons to black walnuts and hickory nuts; growing a backyard vegetable garden; and raising chickens for meat and eggs. Interwoven among tips on how to get started in all these endeavors are recipes, along with black-and-white snapshots of the authors, friends, and family hunting, fishing, gathering, and cooking. The last section of the book includes several essays by Bruce, a longtime outdoors writer, on how he began hunting and fishing—despite a late start in stalking animals and his Depression-era parents’ discouraging his first youthful angling expeditions—and the joys of being outdoors with friends and family. This is a book for active locavores looking to hunt, fish, farm, or forage rather than for the more passive type simply wanting to buy local produce from farmers markets and other sources. A primer aimed at beginners, the volume provides an excellent overview of likely food sources, the basics about how to get them, and resources where readers can find further details. The writing is clear and succinct—occasionally, perhaps, too succinct. The authors leave a few questions unanswered—why should one never eat more than one pawpaw, for instance, or never “buy store apples on sale”? But the Ingrams’ research and decades of experience on their 38 acres in Virginia have yielded a rich harvest of locavore lore. Their love of the outdoors and pleasure in providing for themselves, family, and friends come through vividly, whether for armchair hunters, anglers, and gardeners or for those wanting to use their advice to catch or grow their own food.
A slender book about hunting and gathering that should be useful for those preparing to go out in the field and delightful for those just dreaming about it.Pub Date: March 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-944962-03-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Secant Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
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