Christopher Camuto

"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.… (altro)