An insider’s look at hunting that devotees and nonparticipants alike should find fascinating.
TV host and outdoorsman Rinella (American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, 2008, etc.) contemplates the hunter’s place in modern society while reliving his favorite hunting trips.
Before committing to the writing life, the author made a serious attempt at carving out a career as a fur trapper like his frontier hero Daniel Boone. Even though that endeavor fell through, the kid who grew up bagging squirrels, muskrats and beavers would not abandon the hunt. Instead, he found other ways to devote much of his life to stalking bighorn sheep, black bears, mountain lions and the like. At one point, he even managed to successfully split his time between college and subsistence hunting. While Rinella has taken more than a few trophies along the way, his excursions into the great outdoors have mainly been about feasting on wild game at the conclusion of each hunt—and he’s eager to share. Relentlessly descriptive and endlessly evocative “tasting guides” at the close of each chapter help armchair hunters get a sense of what it might be like digging into their own heaping plate of camp meat, deer hearts or sun-dried jerky. Depending on the palate, readers will find these gamey recipes either mouthwatering or gut-wrenching, but the writing is steadfastly satisfying and clear. A passage on the purported edibility of roasted beaver tail is especially entertaining. The author wisely allows philosophical questions pertaining to the validity of hunting and the efficacy of state-enforced regulations to simmer in the background, and he effectively shows nature in all its glory.
An insider’s look at hunting that devotees and nonparticipants alike should find fascinating.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-52981-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Meditations on hunting, biodiversity, wildlife, ethics, and human folly unify a lifelong bird-hunter's quixotic venture to convert an 800-acre Florida farm into quail heaven. A crack wingshot and professed romantic, de la ValdÇne (a contributor to Field & Stream and other sporting magazines) lived a sportsman's dream, hunting throughout Europe and the US before retreating to an erstwhile tobacco farm near Tallahassee for some large-scale gardening and amateur game management. His devotion to bobwhites is impressive and expensive: He plants crops, clear-cuts or burns acres of forest, and raises a dam to build the habitat and food supply needed to boost quail numbers. This wry chronicle recounts the highs and lows such an audacious project guarantees: Building the dam sans permit to forestall government meddling, he's overcome by red tape after it floods a neighbor's farm and brings a plague of bureaucrats to oversee reconstruction. The highsreveries on nature, hunting, his dogs, and his birds that de la ValdÇne, a world-class daydreamer, can't resistcontribute to the book's charming haphazardness. His genuine love for and keen observation of nature are shaped by predation, and despite his disdain for slob hunters and his understanding of the distaste many nonhunters hold for the sport, de la ValdÇne remains dedicated to hunting, an honorable, primal rite ``as natural as dancing or making love, and just as ancient.'' Unapologetic, he challenges the sacred tenet that hunting pressure is unrelated to declining game populations and castigates sportsmen for shrilly defending second amendment freedoms while industry and human expansion pose the real threat to the sporting life. Beautifully conceived and written, valuable for its insight into quail behavior and its thoughtful address of hunting ethics, a new classic for the sportsman's canon. (First serial to Sports Afield)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87113-618-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Chicago Bulls coach Jackson (with People editor Delehanty) offers an unusual mixture of New Age advice and basketball knowledge, a sort of Zen and the Art of Pro Hoops. Perhaps the most important thing that Jackson has learned in his many years of basketball, first as a player for the New York Knicks and New Jersey Nets, then as a coach in both the minor and major leagues, is that ``winning is ephemeral.'' That is a refreshing attitude for a pro sports coach to take, and it runs throughout this book. Jackson begins his story with Michael Jordan's return to the Bulls toward the end of last season, then flashes back to his own youth in North Dakota. The son of two deeply committed fundamentalist Christians, Jackson has spent much of his adult life trying to reconcile his upbringing with the lessons in Zen Buddhism that he has acquired. Couched in Zen metaphors, his message can be boiled down to two simple precepts: The team is more important than any one player (or coach), and you have to live in the moment, on and off the court, to get the most out of your experiences. Jackson explains succinctly how the Zen Buddhist concern with clearing the mind of impurities to focus on immediate sensation can be put to use in a range of situations. He is surprisingly adept at using examples from NBA play to illustrate seemingly arcane spiritual concepts and, given his resultsthree NBA titles in a row with Chicagoone hesitates to diss him too much. On the other hand, as this season's outcome reminds us, a rebounding power forward is as necessary to winning as a clear mind. Not the goofy, New Age tract you might expect, but probably too abstruse for most basketball fans, with too much basketball for spiritual seekers.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6206-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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