A fluently written celebration of life, punctuated, as always, by death. Worthy of a place alongside Doug Peacock’s Grizzly...
Hunter/conservationist and Outside correspondent Rinella (The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, 2006) chases the last of the wild buffalo, turning up a fine tale in the process.
Readers inclined to things robust and outdoors will probably enjoy a narrative that begins, “In the past week I’ve become something of a buffalo chip connoisseur.” Granted, it’s no “Call me Ishmael,” but Rinella has his own object of mysterious, somewhat inexplicable quest, having once found at high altitude—9,000 snowy feet—the remains of a bison that he decided, armed with sentiment more than science, was alive on July 4, 1776. Buffalo meat, the author proudly notes, is the “real original American meal,” a fitting repast for such a holiday, and the object of hunters from antiquity until the massive 19th-century kill-off of what General Phil Sheridan called “the Indians’ commissary.” (On that note, Rinella reproduces a photograph of a white hunter standing atop a 30-foot-tall heap of buffalo skulls, which certainly gives one pause to wonder.) Searching for the opportunity to recapitulate that primordial hunt in a new age, Rinella embarks upon a modest quest that takes him, for instance, to the gates of media mogul Ted Turner’s Montana ranch, where “for $4,285 (a $500 savings from last year’s prices) I could hunt a trophy-sized bull inside a fenced enclosure,” about par with the prices at other buffalo ranches. Allowing that there’s nothing particularly ennobling or romantic in gunning down a penned animal, Rinella finally obtains a lottery ticket to hunt in Alaska, yielding a resolution that most certainly will not please PETA cardholders but that conservationists will admire—even as Rinella wrestles with the question, “How can I claim to love the very thing that I worked so hard to kill?”
A fluently written celebration of life, punctuated, as always, by death. Worthy of a place alongside Doug Peacock’s Grizzly Years (1990), Jack Turner’s The Abstract Wild (1996) and other meditations on the red-in-tooth-and-claw side of nature.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52168-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clear, useful guide through the current chaotic political landscape.
A sharp explanation of how American politics has become so discordant.
Journalist Klein, co-founder of Vox, formerly of the Washington Post, MSNBC, and Bloomberg, reminds readers that political commentators in the 1950s and ’60s denounced Republicans and Democrats as “tweedledum and tweedledee.” With liberals and conservatives in both parties, they complained, voters lacked a true choice. The author suspects that race played a role, and he capably shows us why and how. For a century after the Civil War, former Confederate states, obsessed with keeping blacks powerless, elected a congressional bloc that “kept the Democratic party less liberal than it otherwise would’ve been, the Republican Party congressionally weaker than it otherwise would’ve been, and stopped the parties from sorting themselves around the deepest political cleavage of the age.” Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, many white Southern Democrats became Republicans, and the parties turned consistently liberal and conservative. Given a “true choice,” Klein maintains, voters discarded ideology in favor of “identity politics.” Americans, like all humans, cherish their “tribe” and distrust outsiders. Identity was once a preoccupation of minorities, but it has recently attracted white activists and poisoned the national discourse. The author deplores the decline of mass media (network TV, daily newspapers), which could not offend a large audience, and the rise of niche media and internet sites, which tell a small audience only what they want to hear. American observers often joke about European nations that have many parties who vote in lock step. In fact, such parties cooperate to pass legislation. America is the sole system with only two parties, both of which are convinced that the other is not only incompetent (a traditional accusation), but a danger to the nation. So far, calls for drastic action to prevent the apocalypse are confined to social media, fringe activists, and the rhetoric of Trump supporters. Fortunately—according to Klein—Trump is lazy, but future presidents may be more savvy. The author does not conclude this deeply insightful, if dispiriting, analysis by proposing a solution.
A clear, useful guide through the current chaotic political landscape.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0032-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The...
Former Secretary of State Clinton tells—well, if not all, at least what she and her “book team” think we ought to know.
If this memoir of diplomatic service lacks the preening self-regard of Henry Kissinger’s and the technocratic certainty of Dean Acheson’s, it has all the requisite evenhandedness: Readers have the sense that there’s not a sentence in it that hasn’t been vetted, measured and adjusted for maximal blandness. The news that has thus far made the rounds has concerned the author’s revelation that the Clintons were cash-strapped on leaving the White House, probably since there’s not enough hanging rope about Benghazi for anyone to get worked up about. (On that current hot-button topic, the index says, mildly, “See Libya.”) The requisite encomia are there, of course: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow.” So are the crises and Clinton’s careful qualifying: Her memories of the Benghazi affair, she writes, are a blend of her own experience and information gathered in the course of the investigations that followed, “especially the work of the independent review board charged with determining the facts and pulling no punches.” When controversy appears, it is similarly cushioned: Tinhorn dictators are valuable allies, and everyone along the way is described with the usual honorifics and flattering descriptions: “Benazir [Bhutto] wore a shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan, a long, flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive, and she covered her hair with lovely scarves.” In short, this is a standard-issue political memoir, with its nods to “adorable students,” “important partners,” the “rich history and culture” of every nation on the planet, and the difficulty of eating and exercising sensibly while logging thousands of hours in flight and in conference rooms.
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The guiding metaphor of the book is the relay race, and there’s a sense that if the torch is handed to her, well….Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5144-3
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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