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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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