From the host of the Travel Channel's "The Wild Within."
A hunt for the American buffalo--an adventurous, fascinating
examination of an animal that has haunted the American imagination.
In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild
buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the
odds--there's only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and
fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful--Rinella
managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then
raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly
bears and suffering from hypothermia. Throughout these adventures,
Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000
years' worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the
buffalo's place in the American experience. At the time of the
Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40
million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but
by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo
is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West,
Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare
to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the
American wilderness.
"American Buffalo" is a narrative tale of Rinella's 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 Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones
amid artifacts of the New World's earliest human inhabitants; to
buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs
by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a "bone charcoal"
plant that made fortunes in the late 1800s by turning millions of
tons of buffalo bones into bone meal, black dye, and fine china;
and even to an abattoir turned fashion mecca in Manhattan's
Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond
met his fate after serving 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 a quirky blend of facts and observations
about history, biology, and the natural world. Both a captivating
narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance,
"American Buffalo" tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as
it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the
American ethos.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
