 The Rancher's Source for No-Nonsense Firearms |
Book Reviews |
BOOK REVIEW |
||||
Boone and Crockett Club $19.95 at bookstores or from the publisher. One unfortunate result of the anti-hunter bias of the mainstream media is that our best outdoor writers are pigeon-holed in the narrow confines of the Hunting section of bookstores and libraries. A young person, even a non-hunter, could receive no better introduction to the wonders of wild, unspoiled nature than by reading the clear, engaging prose of Theodore Roosevelt, Jack O’Conner, Peter Capstick, Terry Weiland or Craig Boddington. - - Max H. Peters |
 |
|||
BOOK REVIEW |
||||
Hardcover, 136 pages. $25 When E.F. Schumacher wrote Small Is Beautiful he could have been talking about this book. At first glance, the 7¼" x 8¼" book looks slight, when, in fact, it is quite comprehensive. The first 35 pages, showcasing in full color U. S. Navy rope knives of the 1800's, is worth more than the price of the whole volume. Several of the early rope knives have never been in a book before. Including the rope knives, there are over 120 color photographs showing almost 200 different government issue pocketknives, from the earliest days of the U.S. Navy all the way up to the high tech knives of the twenty-first century. The text is, at the same time, authoritative, engaging, and succinct. With the military always having been such a big factor in American knifemaking, this book is handy to have along on knife collecting jaunts. In the three months I have had my copy, it has helped me identify two flea market treasures.  |
|
|||
BOOK REVIEW |
||||
Cormac McCarthy is the latest in a line of American yarn-spinners that goes back to Fenimore Cooper, novelists willing to tramp rough country in order to shed new and different light on the prosaic. In Jack London's stories of the Far North, for instance, the implacable reality, the White Silence, is snow. In this novel, it's blow. A seemingly regular guy, out hunting antelope in the west Texas desert, stumbles upon two million dollars of what is obviously drug money. He decides to keep it, an arbitrary decision that results in all hell breaking loose. Reviewers, even the one in Texas Monthly magazine, have berated McCarthy for suddenly taking up what they disdainfully refer to as the "thriller" format. The fact that the film rights have already been sold is trotted out repeatedly, the insinuation being that McCarthy has at long last sold out, like everybody else. The dickweed structuralist reviewer in the New Yorker even came up with a comparison between the body count per page in this book and McCarthy's other novels. He finds this both amusing and telling; what it tells me is that there is still a big bunch of presumptuous postmodernists running loose out there with their head so far up their collective reflective ass that even an atavistic calf-puller like Cormac McCarthy may never be able to pull them out. But let us not give up hope. Point of fact, you will come across few, if any, "thrillers" where the bloody mayhem is set in the context of long meditations that work up to lines like "I don't recall that I gave the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did." What is missed in these reviews is the central recognition that McCarthy is, in the most tonic sense of Sartre's term, a committed writer; he cares deeply about the people of the Southwest, his adopted home. An old peace officer in this novel says to himself, "I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics." McCarthy didn't make up the violence in the world; check out the body count in today's paper. "I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there ain't nothin short of the second coming of Christ that can slow this train. I don't know what is the use of me layin awake over it. But I do." --Max H. Peters |
||||
|
"Only those who have lived on the Plains can appreciate the unpurchasable convenience of a hunting-knife. Whether it is to carve a buffalo or a mountain trout, mend horse equipments, or close up a rent in the tent, there is a constant demand for the services of a good hunting-knife." -Gen. George Armstrong Custer "I will unsheathe my bowie knife, and conquer or die." -Brigham Young |
|
||
 From the collection of the editor |
||||
|
||||
© 2007 Ranch Guns
ranchguns.com email: feedback@ranchguns.com
P.O. Box 60961, Sacramento CA 95860
(916) 484-3757
Site design by Ken Jackson