Monday, May 7, 2012

Backlash: A Compendium of Lore and Lies (Mostly Lies) Concerning Hunting, Fishing and the Out of Doors

Backlash: A Compendium of Lore and Lies (Mostly Lies) Concerning Hunting, Fishing and the Out of Doors Review



BACKLASH is a collection of 35 hunting and fishing stories originally appearing on the back pages of outdoor sports magazines. The book is an essential addition to the library of all hunters and fishermen who have developed the ability to read. It explains to duck hunters how they can convince a skeptical wife to pluck ducks. Upland bird hunters will learn how to dispose of the bodies of dead woodcock and the sportsman's program for resolving the Near East Israel - Palestinian crisis has already been forwarded to the State Department (and completely disregarded). A clear, no-nonsense explanation of how to pick mushrooms is provided at no extra cost.
The BACKLASH collection has been designed to make the outdoorsman smile and the politically correct frown. It has received appropriate recognition from recognized literary masters.

"The BACKLASH tales are classics. They will command a place in outdoor literature for weeks." William Shakespeare

"All of these stories have been stolen from THE COMPLEAT ANGLER. You will hear from my attorneys in the morning." Isaak Walton

"BACKLASH is entirely responsible for the degree of interest I have in hunting and fishing." Oscar Wilde

About the Author:
An attorney, Galen Winter lived in Latin America and, for fifteen years, specialized in international law. He became a corporation counsel in Milwaukee, then in Chicago and, finally, engaged in the private practice of law in northern Wisconsin where, he says, "A man can associate with dogs and shotguns without arousing too much suspicion."
Winter began writing about his passions - hunting and fishing - in 1981, contributing many articles to several national and regional outdoor magazines. He compiled a wild game cookbook, and wrote two novels. BACKLASH is one of his six volumes of outdoor humor.
Winter has hunted and fished all over the western hemisphere - in arctic islands north of Canada's Nunavut Territory, in the Amazon basin, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, the Argentine Patagonia, Uruguay and various places within the United States where game birds are found.
Jessine, his wife of over fifty years, has put up with him through it all. They live in Shawano, Wisconsin.


Tuesday, May 1, 2012

The Complete Hunter: Duck Hunting (The Hunting and Fishing Library)

The Complete Hunter: Duck Hunting (The Hunting and Fishing Library) Review



This guide provides hunters with the knowledge, methods and equipment for hunting ducks.


Sunday, April 29, 2012

Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and The Wilderness Hunter

Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and The Wilderness Hunter Review



There may be no better example of American individualism and rugged outdoorsman than the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. In this volume we find two of Roosevelt's works on hunting, "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman" and "The Wilderness Hunter", combined into one volume. Roosevelt, who as President would bring some 230 million acres of land under the protection of the National Parks and Forest Services, was a great naturalist and his love of the outdoors is evident in the depictions of these books. Careful attention is devoted to the sport of hunting as these books work as both nature travelogues and practical treatises on how to bag game both big and small. Roosevelt recounts numerous hunts in this volume which will thrill and delight the hunting and nature aficionado alike.


Sunday, April 22, 2012

A Southern Sportsman: The Hunting Memoirs of Henry Edwards Davis

A Southern Sportsman: The Hunting Memoirs of Henry Edwards Davis Review



Henry Edwards Davis (1879–1966) began his hunting adventures as a boy riding in the saddle with his father on foxhunts and deer drives in the company of Confederate cavalry veterans. Born on Hickory Grove Plantation in Williamsburg County, South Carolina, Davis developed his taste for the hunt at an early age. In later years he became a renowned sportsman and expert on sporting firearms. Published here for this first time after a four-decade-long hiatus, his collection of southern hunting tales describes his many experiences in pursuit of turkeys, deer, ducks, and partridges through the fields, forests, and swamps of South Carolina’s Pee Dee region. His memoir offers a lucid firsthand account of a time before paved roads and river-spanning bridges had penetrated the rural stretches of Williamsburg and Florence counties, when hunting was still one of a southerner’s chief social activities. With a sportsman’s interest and a historian’s curiosity, Davis intersperses his hunting narratives with tales of the region’s rich history, from before the American Revolution to his times in the first half of the twentieth century.

Davis, a connoisseur of fine sporting firearms, also chronicles his personal experiences with a long line of rifles and shotguns, beginning with his first “Old Betsy,” a fourteen-gauge, cap-lock muzzleloader, and later with some of the finest modern American and British shotguns. He describes as well a host of small-bore rifles, many of which he assembled himself, bedding the barrels and actions in hand-carved stocks.

Edited by retired lowcountry game warden Ben McC. Moïse and featuring a foreword by outdoor writer Jim Casada, Davis’s memoir is a valuable account of hunting lore and historic firearms, as well as a record of evolving cultural attitudes and economic conditions in post-Reconstruction South Carolina and of the practices that gave rise to modern natural conservation efforts.


Saturday, April 21, 2012

Hunting The Edges

Hunting The Edges Review



"Hunting the Edges is a delight. It is more than a hunting book: it is a testament to truth as much as the hunter can know it, which, Yatzeck will tell you, can be as far off the mark as a load of six's fired at a racketing grouse."-Bill Stokes, author of The River Is Us

"Dick Yatzeck, along with the late George Vukelich and Mel Ellis, stands out among the best Wisconsin outdoor writers."-Chuck Petrie, Ducks Unlimited Magazine

"The Wolf River in May or a blue October day still regularly pull me awash or afield, with a Springer spaniel for choice. I tend to seek the edges, the meeting place of plowed land and woods, in crisp weather. I learned my hunting from good men, farmers who did their own butchering and saw hunting as an extension of it. Few of us have such roots now, and hunting will perhaps eventually disappear. When it does, I hope to have disappeared too, but not before having done a bit to preserve its memory."-Richard Yatzeck

Hunting the Edges offers both fine and funny examples of the classic hunting story, and something more: an acknowledgment of that edge between the cycles of modern life and the age-old seasonal call of the hunt. Dick Yatzeck's tales of hunting and fishing through his youth and adulthood will resonate with many readers who also leave behind a job and house in town for boots and camouflage and the wild cries of geese.

This is a beautiful book about hunting--an activity society increasingly considers a beastly, barbaric pursuit, unworthy of man. Hunting will die out; it will go the way of the woods. But before it disappears completely, read this. So you will know what it was.

"I am writing in a a slanting attic above a farm kitchen to the sound of wild geese. The geese are so low that with the north window open, you can hear their heavy wingbeats. On that north windowledge is a hand-made Chinese checkers board, drilled, nailed and painted with a flat, kitchen green by Art Bloom, a Norwegian farmer who lived in Genesee fifty years ago. It was on his farm that I took the hunting fever, and his acres were the first "edge" I hunted. I miss him.

"Edge is a central notion here. It is, for wild fauna, the open space next to deep woods cover where clover, berries, grassy browse grow. Hunters seek edge to find game. In another sense, edge is where the demands of white paint, civilization, may at times be evaded. Here hunting and gathering is still minimally possible. The deer return to the glades to sleep, the hunter to white clapboard."


Thursday, April 19, 2012

The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing: Fiction (Penguin Ink)

The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing: Fiction (Penguin Ink) Review



A critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, this spirited and wickedly insightful narrative maps the progress of fourteen-year- old Jane Rosenal as she navigates the perilous terrain of love, sex, and relationships, capturing-with perfect pitch-what it's like to be a young woman in America today.


Sunday, April 15, 2012

A Native Son's Story of Fishing, Hunting and Duck Decoys in the Lowcountry

A Native Son's Story of Fishing, Hunting and Duck Decoys in the Lowcountry Review



In Winyah Bay, near Georgetown, South Carolina, the Caines family is known for three things: fishing, hunting and hell-raising. Jerry Caines and his younger brother Roy-the Caines boys-grew up following the untamed example of their grandfather, Hucks Caines, and great-uncles-collectively known as the Caines brothers-who were renowned hunting guides at Hobcaw Barony. In this book, follow two generations of hell-raising Caineses as they achieve lasting fame carving duck decoys (now collectable and worth thousands), guiding hunters in Hobcaw Barony, fishing for shad and telling tall tales of their misadventures-often staring smack down the barrel of a rifle, and getting away with it just the same. From Hucks, Sawney, Ball, Bob and Pluty to Jerry and Roy, hunting and fishing in South Carolina will never be the same.