I haven’t had a ton of time for recreational reading over the past year, and my backlog of books has become a little intimidating.  However, with Christmas gift season on the horizon (or already under the keel, if you’re one of those annoying early-birds), I thought I’d better complete a few books that have been sent to me for review. 

We’ll start with a book I’ve actually been sitting on since the 2010 SHOT Show, The Gun Rights War (Amazon.com link here).  I started reading it right after I got home from the show, but it got set aside in the madness of this past spring, and I was only able to get back to it this summer.  Honestly, there are still a couple of chapters I haven’t finished, but that’s only because I’ve been trying to catch up so many other books, magazines, and videos.

For those who’ve been paying attention to the ongoing battles regarding the 2nd Amendment for a while, Neal Knox may be a familiar name.  His involvement started in the late 1960s and continued until his death in 2003.  Knox’s efforts, in large part, laid the groundwork for the NRA’s political and legal action committees.  Knox was a well-known columnist in several shooting magazines at the time, and with that sort of podium and excellent writing skills, he was pretty influential.  This book presents a compilation of his columns, put together and annotated by his son, Chris Knox.

Like many hunters and sportsmen I know, I’ve had a long-standing love/hate relationship with the NRA.  I’ve often challenged their rhetoric and dishonest tactics, but at the same time I’ve always appreciated that they were (at times) the only voice we had fighting to protect our gun freedoms.  In the collection of columns, Knox lays a lot of those arguments out, including some that have practically become cliche, but he does so with logic and examples to support each argument… something that is painfully missing from much of the literature presented by the NRA to rank and file membership, and to the press.  In fact, the way the NRA (mis)communicates to the members and the media became a huge issue for Knox, and eventually led to an upheaval (and his expulsion)… a key point of the book.  Knox insisted on honesty, even when the facts didn’t paint the rosiest of pictures.  As we know, honesty is usually an early casualty when things get political.

For his part, Chris Knox’s annotations help to set the context and history around some of the columns.  Without this background, folks like myself who were still children in the 60s would probably be a little lost.  Chris does a nice job of setting the stage for his father’s words without burdening the reader with too much of his personal interpretation. 

Anyway, if you’re interested in learning more about the gun rights discussion, particularly as it developed over the past three decades, this is an excellent source of information.  You’ll read some pretty scary truths about efforts by various political forces to severely restrict our access to guns (there are some good reasons 2nd Amendment advocates sometimes sound “paranoid”), a good bit about the political contortions on all sides of the debate, and how efforts by the NRA and other organizations have shaped gun laws in this country. 

The most important thing I believe you’ll learn, though, is how important it is for the the membership of the NRA to step up and direct the organization’s path and leadership.  Knox was a huge advocate for empowering the members at all levels so that their voices could be heard, and so that the NRA would reflect the goals and wishes of the members.  Honestly, I believe the organization needs another Neal Knox today. 

Even though I’m not especially active in the gun rights discussion, I really enjoyed this book and learned a lot about things I thought I already knew, and much more that I’d never even heard about.  For anyone who writes much about guns or 2nd Amendment politics, I’d consider this book required reading.

From politics to the skinning shed…

The next book in my “To Be Reviewed” pile is The Complete Book of Butchering, Smoking, Curing, and Sausage Making (How To Harvest Your Livestock and Wild Game), by Phillip Hasheider. 

I’ve been processing my own game from field to table for years, and while there are a lot of folks who can do it more artfully, I’ve usually been plenty satisfied with my own work.  Nevertheless, I went into this book while I was up at Coon Camp Springs, in hopes that it would give me some new ideas or improved techniques.  (Besides, without TV or computer up there, reading is pretty much the only entertainment after the clients go to bed and the fire is still burning.) 

The initial chapters of the book, honestly, kind of turned me off.  There’s a lot of stuff in here about the history of meat, butchering and processing, and even some health and safety topics.  However, this isn’t what I was looking for in a “how-to” book.  I guess the idea was to make it a little more robust than just a step-by-step manual, but in my opinion, the early stuff really just bogged me down.  For this kind of content (history of meat as food, etc.), I’d rather read someone like Michael Pollan. 

My other big complaint here was that there seemed to be a lot of general information, but it never really closes the loop with detail.   For example, when it talks about knives and equipment, there’s never really a strong recommendation for a specific tool.  A novice could have really benefited if the author would have simply offered a preference.  Simply telling us that there are several options doesn’t help the new butcher choose one.

I kept on reading, though, and I’m glad I did.  Once the book gets to the meat of the issue (bad pun intended), the book really gets good.  The techniques are described thoroughly and clearly, and the accompanying graphics generally support each topic (the graphic layout lost me a couple of times).  I believe that even a novice could follow these steps from one end to the other without a lot of confusion.  Butcher’s terms are defined and illustrated, as are the critical steps.  There’s even a little how and why, which goes a long ways toward actually teaching the techniques and not merely listing them.

I’m not big on recipes, so honestly, I gave them short shrift when I read the book.  I’m sure they’re fine, but there are a zillion cookbooks out there already.  I suppose that having the recipes right along with the butchering and processing steps is convenient enough, so I won’t knock it. 

The only other constructive comment I’d offer is that this is the kind of book some folks might like to take into the skinning shed with them.  The steps are laid out every bit as well as a procedural manual, but the smallish size of the book would make it hard to lay open on the table while you work.  The pages are pretty thick and glossy, so I expect they could withstand a little blood and water spatter, but the binding seems a little nice to risk covering in gore.  A redesign to make it more of a table-top book might be an idea for future printings.

Overall, I definitely learned some new stuff from this book despite having been processing game for so long.  That was cool.  I expect that someone who is new to butchering and processing could learn a ton more from it… and anyone looking to start raising, slaughtering, and processing their own livestock would do well to have this information on their bookshelf.  Just skip those first couple of chapters and get down to the task at hand.

Finally, my favorite of the bunch…  Kingdom Under Glass, by Jay Kirk. 

In the early years of the 20th century, the relationships between human and nature were pretty tenuous.  It was a time of newfound wealth, rapidly developing technology, and expansionism.  For most people, the idea that global, natural resources might be limited was still the fanciful realm of the gloom-and-doom set.  In their minds, there were still great, unexplored places in the world where flora and fauna flourished without end… there for the picking whenever we wanted it.  One such place was Africa.

At the same time, as more and more Americans settled into an increasingly urbanized and industrialized world, Nature became a thing to observe through the glass of a museum display, in the zoological park, or at Mr. Barnum’s big circus.  Only a small handful of people saw that Nature was in peril of disappearing entirely… not only from this continent, but around the world.  Among these visionaries stood individuals like Theodore Roosevelt and Carl Akeley. 

I doubt there are many Americans who haven’t at least heard of “Teddy” Roosevelt (although I wonder how many know of his contribution to the preservation of American wilderness), but I doubt more than a handful have any idea who Carl Akeley was.  Kingdom Under Glass seeks to remedy that, and it does so in a thoroughly enjoyable walk through history (or his story, if you prefer).

I don’t generally read much biography or straight history.  As much as I love to read, I’ve always found these genres to be dry as overcooked venison.  Occasionally, though, there’s an exception.  Jay Kirk makes that exception in this book, and does so in a way that made me forget from time to time that I was not reading a good novel.  Of course, the reason for that is that he manages to “novel-ize” the subject matter.  He uses the historical and biographical facts to develop a storyline, and through extensive research into the letters, journals, and other correspondence between the main characters, he recreates dialogue. 

Now this is a risky move on the part of the author because if he loses credibility, he’s done.  You can’t just make real characters say stuff and still call the work a “biography”.  That’s fiction, no matter how true the story may be.  Kirk skirts this failure by relying on key quotes that are attributable to correspondence, commentary from witnesses, and even film and photographic history.  For example, he recreates an entire scene in Akeley’s studio, right down to the rag carried in a back pocket, based on a series of photographs.

The writing itself is generally very good, and I was brought into the story easily.  While the mark of good fiction is that it “creates a willing suspension of disbelief”, Kirk goes one step further because he’s not writing fiction at all.  If anything, he’s challenged by the genre to remove any sense of disbelief.   The reader has to believe that this is a true story, and that the events and characters are as real as the history they made.  In my opinion, he accomplished that in spades.

So the writing was good.  Who is Carl Akeley and why should you care?  Why would you, a hunter or sportsman, want to read this book?

Carl Akeley was a pioneer of taxidermy.  At the turn of the 19th century, the taxidermist’s art consisted primarily of stuffing cured skins with sawdust.  The resultant work often left, at best, a vague representation of the original animal, but for the urban customer or museum visitor who had probably never seen many of these animals alive, the caricature was sufficient. 

Akeley was one of a handful of folks who believed taxidermy could, and should, be much more.  He approached a mount as a sculptor… as an artist… and developed techniques that would become the standard for decades.  For example, he studied the live dimensions of each specimen, and then recreated them with clay before laying the skin on.  He also believed in setting the mounted animals in realistic environments, complete with replica plant life.  The resultant lifelike representations put him in high demand, and soon he was creating natural dioramas for the likes of the American Museum of Natural History. 

In his role for the major museums, he soon found himself on specimen gathering safaris in Africa… including a major venture with Roosevelt’s safari for the Smithsonian Institution (Roosevelt and his son killed tens of thousands of African species for museums and scientists on their forays to the Dark Continent).  The oddly contradictory idea of these excursions was to collect specimens before they were all wiped out… a realistic possibility, given the sudden popularity of the African safari.  As trains, and then automobiles became more common in Africa while game laws and conservation were barely present, wildlife there took a beating. 

Akeley recognized this impending disaster, and after having killed hundreds or thousands of animals himself, began to wonder if something else might be done.  The mountain gorilla was the calayst for this change, and before his death, Akeley was responsible for convincing king of Belgium to set aside one of the first wildlife preserves in Africa to protect these great animals.  It’s a heck of a legacy.

I haven’t done a very good job here of describing a really good book.  You’d be better off just to read it for yourself and make up your own mind.  Kingdom Under Glass, A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve The World’s Great Animals, is available at Amazon, or at most other booksellers.

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