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Title details for Meat Eater by Steven Rinella - Available

Meat Eater

Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

by Steven Rinella
Jeffrey Kafer
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
“Revelatory . . . With every chapter, you get a history lesson, a hunting lesson, a nature lesson and a cooking lesson. . . . Meat Eater offers an overabundance to savor.”—The New York Times Book Review
  
Steven Rinella grew up in Twin Lake, Michigan, the son of a hunter who taught his three sons to love the natural world the way he did. As a child, Rinella devoured stories of the American wilderness, especially the exploits of his hero, Daniel Boone. He began fishing at the age of three and shot his first squirrel at eight and his first deer at thirteen. He chose the colleges he went to by their proximity to good hunting ground, and he experimented with living solely off wild meat. As an adult, he feeds his family from the food he hunts.

Meat Eater chronicles Rinella’s lifelong relationship with nature and hunting through the lens of ten hunts, beginning when he was an aspiring mountain man at age ten and ending as a thirty-seven-year-old Brooklyn father who hunts in the remotest corners of North America. He tells of having a struggling career as a fur trapper just as fur prices were falling; of a dalliance with catch-and-release steelhead fishing; of canoeing in the Missouri Breaks in search of mule deer just as the Missouri River was freezing up one November; and of hunting the elusive Dall sheep in the glaciated mountains of Alaska.
 
Through each story, Rinella grapples with themes such as the role of the hunter in shaping America, the vanishing frontier, the ethics of killing, the allure of hunting trophies, the responsibilities that human predators have to their prey, and the disappearance of the hunter himself as Americans lose their connection with the way their food finds its way to their tables. Hunting, he argues, is intimately connected with our humanity; assuming responsibility for acquiring the meat that we eat, rather than entrusting it to proxy executioners, processors, packagers, and distributors, is one of the most respectful and exhilarating things a meat eater can do.
 
A thrilling storyteller with boundless interesting facts and historical information about the land, the natural world, and the history of hunting, Rinella also includes after each chapter a section of “Tasting Notes” that draws from his thirty-plus years of eating and cooking wild game, both at home and over a campfire. In Meat Eater he paints a loving portrait of a way of life that is part of who we are as humans and as Americans.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 9, 2020

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593163573
      • File size: 191416 KB
      • Duration: 06:38:46

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Jeffrey Kafer's journalistic style conveys the rich history, romance, mystery, and masculinity that surround hunting. In this detailed, down-to-earth narrative, the author offers his philosophy of hunting and explains, among other things, why he eats meat as well as what hunting means to him and how it has shaped his moral compass. This narrative on how and why hunting evolved is interwoven with the author's own rich family history and detailed hunting tips and tricks, including how to identify numerous animals and prepare them for cooking. Kafer reads with a steady cadence, utilizing slight tonal changes to define the author's tangents. His well-timed pauses convey the hazards and epiphanies that shaped the author's experiences. M.F. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 13, 2012
      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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