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
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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