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Hunting from Home: A Year Afield in the Blue Ridge Mountains
Come along with Christopher Camuto for a year of transforming experiences in the shadows of the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains: hunting grouse with his setter through snowbound forests in winter; wading trout streams in spring; closely observing birds and wildlife through summer; exploring the backcountry, cutting wood, and hunting deer in autumn.
- GenresNature
316 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 19, 2017
"It's not true, what Jose Ortega y Gasset asserts, that only by hunting can you get to know country, be in country."
I agree. Simply by reading Camuto's book on hunting, fishing, and outdoor life in the Blue Ridge Mountains can readers virtually immerse themselves in the landscape without ever setting foot. His language is precise, poetic, and allows readers to feel the wildness around them whether reading this book in their own cabin--as I did--or in the noisy stench of an overpopulated metropolis. It resembles prose less than it does dessert, an autumn breeze, jazz, or some other metaphorical, metaphysical concept.
On the backswing, Camuto's writing seems at most time just that--writing. It lacks any real story, collective point or narrative, or connection beyond its wooded setting. It's a nice read--a breath of good air--but overall rather attention deficit, even within its own chapters...essays...passages. And sitting through Camuto's tendency to list every known tree or bird in Virginia is rather burdensome.
I read this book concurrently with Thoreau's Walden, something I greatly suggest, and in many ways it is a modern-day Walden. Except Thoreau aimed his narrative toward some strong overlying principles rather than listing 426 species of deciduous trees in alphabetical order.
I liked it, but I am a bird of his feather, and we are a rare breed in this golden dawn of WiFi and vegan string cheese.
I agree. Simply by reading Camuto's book on hunting, fishing, and outdoor life in the Blue Ridge Mountains can readers virtually immerse themselves in the landscape without ever setting foot. His language is precise, poetic, and allows readers to feel the wildness around them whether reading this book in their own cabin--as I did--or in the noisy stench of an overpopulated metropolis. It resembles prose less than it does dessert, an autumn breeze, jazz, or some other metaphorical, metaphysical concept.
On the backswing, Camuto's writing seems at most time just that--writing. It lacks any real story, collective point or narrative, or connection beyond its wooded setting. It's a nice read--a breath of good air--but overall rather attention deficit, even within its own chapters...essays...passages. And sitting through Camuto's tendency to list every known tree or bird in Virginia is rather burdensome.
I read this book concurrently with Thoreau's Walden, something I greatly suggest, and in many ways it is a modern-day Walden. Except Thoreau aimed his narrative toward some strong overlying principles rather than listing 426 species of deciduous trees in alphabetical order.
I liked it, but I am a bird of his feather, and we are a rare breed in this golden dawn of WiFi and vegan string cheese.
October 15, 2013
"Christopher Camuto has bee praised for writing 'with the clear-sightedness and imaginative reach--both inward and outward--of a poet' (Verilyn Klinkenborg). In Hunting from Home, Camuto takes the reader through a year of intense experiences hunting grouse with his setter through snowbound forests in winter; wading trout streams in spring; closely observing birds and wildlife through summer; exploring the back country, chopping wood, and hunting deer in autumn. Writing in a tradition that reaches back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, he takes seriously--and hoyously--Henry David Thoreau's injunction ot practice 'the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen.' "
"Camuto writes incisively about the hunter's paradoxical love of the game he pursues, but he also hunts in the broadest sense possible, searching out and witnessing the life of the things he loves--brook trout and black bear, hawks and warblers--with the hope of sharing the pleasures and preoccupations of a 'border life' lived, with deep satisfaction, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
"Hunting from Home completes a trilogy on the southern Appalachians. Camuto's first book, A Fly Fisherman's Blue Ridge, was called 'a series of deeply moving essays on an American region by an angler with an eye for details and a poet's way with the language ... Reminds one of Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, even Thoreau' (Virginia Quarterly Review). His second, Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains, received a strong citation in Orion magazine: 'Not since Barry Lopez welded landscape and imagination together in Arctic Dreams has a writer so ambitiously attempted to elevate local culture and landscape to universal understanding and insight.' Hunting from Home is the culmination of a long and thoughtful journey through the rich natural landscape of the southern Appalachians."
~~front & back flaps
This book was stunning. It took me a long time to read it, just as it took me a long time to read Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and for the same reasons: reading this book was like being out in the woods and the mountains. I always have a sense of disconnectedness when I come back home from being out in the woods and mountains and I felt that same sense when I stopped reading this book -- a sense of grogginess, a befuddlement as to where I was--why were there walls around me, where were the sounds of the wind in the trees, the birds, the grasses?
The blurb seems to imply that Camuto is so lyrical and elegant because he is steeped in the Appalachians. And while that may be true, the man so obviously loves the natural world around him that I have every confidence that he could wax as lyrical and elegant about any section of our country, or the world.
"Camuto writes incisively about the hunter's paradoxical love of the game he pursues, but he also hunts in the broadest sense possible, searching out and witnessing the life of the things he loves--brook trout and black bear, hawks and warblers--with the hope of sharing the pleasures and preoccupations of a 'border life' lived, with deep satisfaction, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
"Hunting from Home completes a trilogy on the southern Appalachians. Camuto's first book, A Fly Fisherman's Blue Ridge, was called 'a series of deeply moving essays on an American region by an angler with an eye for details and a poet's way with the language ... Reminds one of Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, even Thoreau' (Virginia Quarterly Review). His second, Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains, received a strong citation in Orion magazine: 'Not since Barry Lopez welded landscape and imagination together in Arctic Dreams has a writer so ambitiously attempted to elevate local culture and landscape to universal understanding and insight.' Hunting from Home is the culmination of a long and thoughtful journey through the rich natural landscape of the southern Appalachians."
~~front & back flaps
This book was stunning. It took me a long time to read it, just as it took me a long time to read Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and for the same reasons: reading this book was like being out in the woods and the mountains. I always have a sense of disconnectedness when I come back home from being out in the woods and mountains and I felt that same sense when I stopped reading this book -- a sense of grogginess, a befuddlement as to where I was--why were there walls around me, where were the sounds of the wind in the trees, the birds, the grasses?
The blurb seems to imply that Camuto is so lyrical and elegant because he is steeped in the Appalachians. And while that may be true, the man so obviously loves the natural world around him that I have every confidence that he could wax as lyrical and elegant about any section of our country, or the world.
June 9, 2009
Love, LOVE Camuto's writing. It's lyrical, intense, and immediate, making the events and the countryside he describes pretty much leap off the page and into my mind's eye - and my soul. His descriptions of how he hunts with his dog, Patch, are so evocative, I can see the relationship between man and dog as if it were a visible structure.
March 30, 2016
The book was a modern day Thoreau. It as times difficult. I disagree with many of his assessments (Forest Management). It took me a long time to read, but the last three chapters made it worthwhile.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews