While steering clear of taking sides in the matter of recreational hunting, Dray provides a lively history that can be...
A revealing history of recreational hunting in America and the numerous social and political complexities involved.
Throughout the world, hunting is pursued as a sport, business, and sustenance, but nowhere is it as popular as in America. Dray (There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America, 2010, etc.) focuses on that first category in exploring the sweeping history of this controversial topic. As recreation, hunting arrived in America along with the first non-Native settlers, but it was not until the mid-1800s and into the Gilded Age that sport hunting grew to enjoy immense popularity, in large part due to a recognition of “the restorative values of the natural world.” Hunting was just one of a number of outdoors activities, including camping and hiking, that city dwellers were taking up in order to fight neurasthenia, a sort of restless anxiety that doctors were diagnosing in the latter half of the 19th century. Some of America’s most recognized names make appearances in Dray’s work as either hunters or commentators on the pursuit. These include George Washington, Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ernest Hemingway. The author does a marvelous job walking us, mostly chronologically, through nearly every aspect and controversy of hunting’s long history, with themes of ethics (“fair chase, the idea that hunted animals must have a chance to evade or flee their pursuers”) and conservation looming large throughout. Perhaps most interesting is the interconnectedness of hunters and conservation efforts throughout the decades. Hunters have led many of those efforts, and today, “wildlife agencies are funded largely from fishing and hunting license fees” as well as taxes on hunting equipment. One chapter, largely on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, feels somewhat out of place, but that’s a minor quibble.
While steering clear of taking sides in the matter of recreational hunting, Dray provides a lively history that can be enjoyed by hunters and conservationists alike.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-06172-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Aly delivers again, this time expanding his lens outside of Germany to offer further revelations about the Holocaust.
The award-winning German author dips into his vast archive of resources to produce a major work on anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism has been around for centuries. Though occasionally somewhat dormant, usually during times of fiscal strength and political peace, it always returns to rear its ugly head, each time spelling disaster for Jewish populations. Aly—the highly respected historian of the Holocaust who won the 2007 Jewish Book Award for his excellent Hitler's Beneficiaries—examines the period of 1880 to 1945 to show how, why, and in what forms anti-Semitism increased sufficiently to support the Nazi concept of the Final Solution. The author ranges widely across Europe, examining Russia, Romania, France, and Greece as well as Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and other less-explored locales. “There is no way we can comprehend the pace and extent of the Holocaust,” writes Aly, “if we restrict our focus to the German centers of command.” While Jews were restricted from many jobs, they applied all their strength and determination to areas that were permitted, such as pharmacology, medicine, and journalism. Governmental actions began with bans on Jews serving municipalities and joining trade associations, and they also experienced limited access to education. After World War I, the concept of self-determination morphed into a brand of nationalism and misguided “racial theory” that led to increased animosity and violence. “Insofar as gentiles in the first half of the twentieth century pressed for Jews to be partially or completely stripped of their civil rights or insisted they be shipped off to somewhere outside Europe,” writes the author, “they were motivated by [an] obsessive anxiety: the fear of a supposedly overwhelming power and the real intellectual and economic agility of a small, precisely delineable ‘foreign’ group.” Though the gruesome subject and detail are sometimes tough to swallow, readers should forge ahead, relishing the author’s incredible research and singular scholarship.
Aly delivers again, this time expanding his lens outside of Germany to offer further revelations about the Holocaust.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17017-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HOLOCAUST | JEWISH | HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
