by Jim Fergus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1992
Wonderfully evoked natural scenes and portraits of hunters from a free-lance writer. Fergus was 39 when he developed a ``strange, overpowering obsession with bird hunting''—which he hadn't thought about since he was a boy—and came home with a shotgun and a yellow Labrador puppy, Sweetzer, named after a mountain ridge in Idaho, where Fergus and his wife lived. Once Sweetzer and Fergus learned the fundamentals, the author decided they would attempt to hunt as many bird species in different habitats as is possible in a season. Thereupon hangs Fergus's picaresque tale, in which he and Sweetzer cover 17,000 miles in five months, from stalking chukar partridges on rocky Montana mountainsides to shooting snipe in the steamy Mobile delta. Fergus paints wonderful portraits of his hunting companions—from novelists Richard Ford and Robert F. Jones to Florida blue-bloods, from dirt farmers who gladly stop their work to take Fergus and Sweetzer on a quick grouse hunt to ``slob'' hunters who ride the roads drinking beer and shooting birds on the ground. The dogs here are also all memorable personalities, as befits bird hunters' closest partners. To his credit, Fergus presents the current antihunting arguments and talks them over with leading bird biologists; most contend that habitat loss, rather then hunting pressure, has been responsible for the declines in bird populations. Among his adventures, Fergus goes on several organized hunts in preserves (one with a group of grim big-city detectives, who blow every bird to shreds) and laments that so much habitat in the US is becoming privatized—a situation long extant in Europe, where bird hunting is an exclusive pursuit of the rich. A top-notch dog-and-gun-book, with sympathetic focus on humans and animals as well as some fine nature writing.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8050-1619-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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