Book Review

Proulx; Newton; Martin; Perry; Gudgeon; et al.

Celebrations of Life, Shooting & Grous

    Reports follow on a book about—and by—late SSM Editor at Large Robert F. Jones; a look at the intellectual evolution of the famed conservationist Aldo Leopold; a couple of works (one serious, one light) about shooting in Britain; and an art book on grouse of the British Isles.

A Roaring in the Blood:
Remembering Robert F. Jones
Edited by Annie Proulx (Sporting Classics, 800-849-1004, www.sporting classics.net; 2007) 193 pp. $40 (deluxe leather-bound edition, $75).

    National Book Award-winning novelist Annie Proulx characterizes the late Bob Jones as “a highly intelligent maverick who loved the blood sports and the rough country of the world” and who “smoked, drank, and tickled danger under the chin.” Early on Jones was a staff writer for Time and Sports Illustrated. Later, as a freelance, he wrote essays and articles for SSM and other outdoor magazines and produced short and long fictional works. Selections from Jones’s sporting writings are presented in this new book as well as reminiscences by a range of people who knew, worked with, and hunted and fished with the man. There’s also a brief section of color photos taken during the last years of Jones’s life.
    Jones was an important writer about the sporting life; I still have a photocopy of an essay he wrote on grouse hunting for Sports Illustrated in the 1970s, when that magazine had the guts to print material about blood sports. It was one of those signal pieces of writing that helped shape my own philosophy toward our chosen craft, writing, and toward our shared passion, hunting.
    Jones’s prose in A Roaring in the Blood includes memoirs, essays, reports from the field (North America and elsewhere) and fiction. The writing is read more »

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