Purchase
In Search of a Lost Icon
Spiegel & Grau
December 2008
On Sale: December 2, 2008
288 pages
ISBN: 0385521685
EAN: 9780385521680
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
A hunt for the American buffaloβan 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 oddsβthereβs only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successfulβRinella 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 yearsβ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffaloβs 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 Rinellaβs 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 buffaloβs past, present, and future: to the Bering Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones amid artifacts of the New Worldβs earliest human inhabitants; to buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a βbone charcoalβ 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 Manhattanβs Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel. Rinellaβs 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.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - December 5, 2008
All Things Considered - December 2, 2008
| 
© 2003-2026