In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. One of only four hunters that year who succeeded in killing a buffalo, he carried the carcass down a snow-covered mountainside and floated it four miles down a white-water canyon while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Through this experience, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years' worth of buffalo hunters in North America and the place of the buffalo in the American consciousness.
American Buffalo is a narrative tale of that hunt. But beyond that, it is the story of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped our national identity. Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo's past, present, and future: to the Bering Strait Land Bridge; to buffalo jumps, where Native Americans ran buffalo over cliffs by the hundreds; even to the Bronx Zoo, where legend has it a depressed buffalo served as the model for the American nickel.
Rinella's erudition and exuberance, combined with his gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with history, science, and the natural world. And yet it also tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.
Buffalo nickel collectors, big-game hunters, and those who prefer their history doused in hegemonic romanticism will adore AMERICAN BUFFALO. If you believe the best way to learn about something is to shoot it, you won't be disappointed. Patrick Lawlor's nasal, excitable voice is an odd choice for a sport-hunting narrative, although his perky salesmanship makes the genocide of Native Americans and the annihilation of the Western ecosystem sound downright fun! So much so that the author shoots his own "buffalo" in remote Alaska. Not even Lawlor's undulating, infomercial-like inflections can animate the author's banal listing of obscure "buffalo" factoids or his stereotypical Alaskan experience. Lawlor flubs on some Alaskan geographical pronunciations, which is hardly noteworthy in comparison to Rinella's insistence on referring to bison as buffalo. J.T. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Steven Rinella is the author of The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine and a correspondent for Outside magazine. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, American Heritage, The New York Times, Field & Stream, Men's Journal, and Salon.com. He grew up in Twin Lake, Michigan, and now splits his time between Anchorage, Alaska and New York City.
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