Review by New York Times Review
THE 18th-century English theologian William Paley once wrote that the principle that will keep a man in everlasting ignorance is contempt prior to investigation. What a loser. Truth be told, I have lived a life plenty comfortable with my disdain toward hunters and hunting. And then along comes Steven Rinella and his revelatory memoir, "Meat Eater," to ruin everything. Unless you count the eternal pursuit of the unmetered parking space, I am not a hunter. I am, however, on a constant quest for good writing. "Meat Eater" begins with a promise - "This book has a hell of a lot going for it, simply because it's a hunting story" - and then delivers ceaselessly, like a Domino's guy with O.C.D. This is survival of the most literate. Graphic, sure, but less so than an episode of "CSI," and with more believable emoting. Early on, Rinella, the author of "American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon" and the host of his own show on the Sportsman Channel, explains why he hunts: "I was hungry in the wilderness and here came a few tons' worth of caribou, 50 yards out and closing fast. In a moment like that, there is no time for emotional dawdling. It is a time for unerring judgment. It is a time for speed, both mental and physical. It is a time for action and precision and discipline. It is a time to do what millions of years' worth of evolution built us to do. And in the act of doing it, you experience the unconfused purity of being a human predator, stripped of everything that is nonessential. In that moment of impending violence and death, you are gifted a beautiful glimpse of life." I'm sure the reference to evolution wrecks it for Sarah Palin and her fellow field-dressers, but this - genuine passion, humbly conveyed - is when nonfiction slaughters fiction and hangs it over its mantle. The text is relentlessly vivid and clear, and not just when recounting a river otter eating a bluegill: "It hissed at me when it noticed me, the sound coming through a mouthful of fish as though the animal were playing a harmonica." The commitment, effort and ardor are unflinching. What Rinella does to prepare a muskrat trap when he's in fifth grade takes five more steps and is infinitely more loving than whatever I did as a fifth grader to break in my baseball glove. With every chapter, you get a history lesson, a hunting lesson, a nature lesson and a cooking lesson, and most of the chapters end with "tasting notes" on various game. Rinella's palate is discerning. He describes the gristle of a beaver tail as "a combination of beef jerky and Styrofoam." Readers will never ask themselves, "What is he talking about?" The only question they might have is, "Why isn't this guy the head of the N.R.A.?" As a 21st-century human being who hunts, Rinella can be as conflicted as a corner man in the 12 th round of a fight he knows he should have stopped in the ninth. He later kills the same river otter ("I made about 50 bucks so that some lady I'd never meet in a country that I'd probably never visit could have a nice coat"), but the sins against nature are rare, and in the hands of a less gifted writer, the less appetizing parts of this book would seem thoughtless, barbaric and irredeemable. But again and again, his descriptive powers trump gruesomeness. Here's how he depicts wandering into a mountain lion kill: "At the end of the drag marks was a dead buck with picked-clean bones that had been buried with leaves and dirt beneath a scrubby little oak. The hide was in pieces but still connected to the carcass here and there, like a person who passed out drunk in bed without getting completely free of his clothes." Some things I still do not understand, like the need to turn a dead bear's head toward the camera before your buddy snaps a photo. Some things I will never understand, like choosing to spend months anywhere with your family, let alone in the woods. Rinella ends his book with what might be an audacious claim: "To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way." This is a tough sell, if he were selling. But he's just sharing, and for the reader brave enough to set aside his contempt prior to investigation, "Meat Eater" offers an overabundance to savor. JUSTLY or unjustly, "My Heart Is an Idiot," Davy Rothbart 's first book of essays, labors under three different comparisons: 1) his pieces against one another, which is the cross-reference to bear of any collection; 2) this book against the organic riotousness of his creation, Found magazine, an accumulation of notes, letters and photos that have been discarded by others; and 3) "My Heart" against "Meat Eater," both of which happen to be reviewed in the same space by the same guy. "My Heart Is an Idiot" is primarily an inventory, however frank, of women Rothbart fell in love with from across a bar, picked up, discarded and then picked up again, recounted in longing, rueful prose. A boyfriend of a girlfriend's mom "was wearing a nice suit but his face was sunburnt and dirty, giving him the vibe of a homeless guy at a job interview." A dead elk Rothbart and another motorist have to move off the highway is as "heavy as a coffin filled with ice." When the prose works, it sings. When it doesn't, it passes out face first on a friend's couch. It seems far-fetched that Rothbart, a frequent contributor to "This American Life," would consistently stumble upon characters so memorable and fully formed, let alone remember entire conversations. But such is the modern personal essay from the House of Ira Glass. It should be called something else, other than nonfiction. "Re-enactmention," perhaps. Wherein a predominantly true story is made more complicated in the service of art. There's gratuitous naughtiness, the liberal dollop of pop-culture references and needless versions of a phrase like "wet eyes" when "tear-filled" would do. But you can overlook all of that in a good story, and there are more than a few. "Human Snowball," in which Rothbart surprises a bartender in Buffalo for Valentine's Day, should have been the template for the other tales of his self-repairing heart. "How I Got These Boots," his encounter with a hitchhiker on the way to the Grand Canyon, is a three-page demonstration of less is more. In his most impressive piece, "The Strongest Man in the World," the pursuit is justice. And the relationship with the opposite sex is refreshingly platonic, because this time, it's with the mother of a friend who's in prison for a murder he probably didn't commit. A lot happens to Rothbart and around him, because he continually seeks out people, places and things. He is adventurous in a sedentary world. At times, he telegraphs the all too serendipitous reunions with those he meets on his travels, and you can see them coming from paragraphs away. But when he's en route - by car, by truck, by bus - he's at his most appealing. "New York, New York," about a two-day trip on Greyhound from Chicago to Manhattan immediately after 9/11, is the best example, if for no other reason than he is moving away from the girl, not toward her. And there is no bar. Mercifully, it has been raised. 'In that moment of impending violence and death, you are gifted a beautiful glimpse of life.' Bill Scheft is a writer for "Late Show With David Letterman." His most recent novel, "Everything Hurts," is being made into a film.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 11, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Rinella hosts two cable-television shows and has written for everything from Bowhunter to O (Oprah's magazine). If hunting has fewer participants and advocates than ever before, Rinella is doing his best to reverse the trend. He is informative, passionate, literary, funny, and, well, cool. Perhaps what's most remarkable about his work is that it offers readers who only hunt at the local grocery store the opportunity to enjoy a vicarious adventure or two in the world of outdoor protein gathering. Rinella walks readers through his years of living off the land, from his youth as a trapper in Michigan through his adult life as a professional hunter and adventurer. Throughout are Tasting Notes, or thoughts on the consumption of wild game. There's a section on squirrel, another on eating heart, and even one on beaver tail. Ewww? Yes, but more often Rinella will pique one's interest. Also important to note is his advocacy of hunting and fishing ethics. Rinella's audience will continue to grow, based on his thoughtful writing.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Rinella (American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon) chronicles his evolution as a hunter (and trapper and fisherman) from shooting squirrels with a BB gun during his Michigan childhood to hunting deer in "the wildest corner of the Wild West" or tracking Dall sheep in the mountains of Alaska, while his wife and son are home in the civilized environs of New York City. Woven into Rinella's thoughtful prose detailing his outdoor adventures (or misadventures, in some cases) are historical, ecological, or technical observations dealing with the landscape, the animals, or the manner in which the game is harvested. Also, almost every chapter is finished with short "Tasting Notes" that outline the culinary dos and don'ts for meat from game like squirrel, black bear, and mountain lion. Rinella has a passion for hunting and wilderness that comes across in his writing, and even if you don't agree with his ideas on hunting lions with dogs or catch-and-release fishing you can't help pondering the arguments he makes. And that seems to be the point of the book, to make you think-about your relationship with nature, about what you eat and why you eat it-and if that's Rinella's motivation, this book succeeds. B&w photos. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
