Jim Corbett was a British hunter, tracker and naturalist and the author of several books. He was born and raised in India during rule of the British Crown in India, referred to the British Raj. Corbett’s father served as a postmaster with the British government and later Jim would serve in the British Indian Army where he held the rank of Colonel. He hunted man-eating tigers and leopards that were preying on the people of the nearby villages of the Kumon-Garhwal Regions at the request of the government of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. He hunted man-eater s for a period of 30 years, his last hunt being in 1938. He published his book, The Man-Eaters of Kumaon in 1944. Upon retirement he moved to Kenya with his sister Maggie where he died at the age of 79 on April 19th, 1955. India became a federal republic separate form the British Empire in 1950.

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“There ain’t but two things really worthwhile,” the Old Man continued. “Anticipation and remembrance. But in order to remember, you have to include the execution of the anticipation.”

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Something of Value is a great novel! It is one of my favorites. I have read several other works by Ruark and have enjoyed them all, Something of Value stands out to me as an exceptional novel. In a way it reminds me of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is my favorite of Hemingway’s Novels.

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I was recently out in Oregon on a fishing trip with my son Mason where we met with Gary Lewis to join us in some fly fishing in Central Oregon. I have been friends with Gary now for 20 years and we have hunted and fished together all over the United States and the World. Gary gave me a signed copy of his book “Born Ballistic”. I greatly enjoyed the first book in this series “Going Ballistic” about John Nosler, this was a great continuation of the story.

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This book was published in London in 1885 by adventure writer Sir H. Hider Haggard. It is a fable about a group of adventurous men led by the main character Allan Quartermain in search for the lost brother of one of the party. It takes place in Africa at a time when much of the interior of Africa had yet been explored.

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I have read most of Capstick’s books, I intend to do a review of the others as well. He is a good writer in my opinion and his story telling reminds me of Hemingway and Ruark when it comes to African hunting literature.

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I bought this book in 2018 to read prior to a hunt for Cape Buffalo in the Luangwa Valley of Zambia. I was encouraged while reading the book and finding out that Boddington had success in the same area and the world record buffalo came from Zambia.

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This book is an account of Ernest Hemingway’s safari with his fourth wife Mary in late 1953 and early 1954. This trip ended abruptly in January 1954 after they had two near-fatal plane crashes in East Africa. While back in Havana, Hemingway wrote his “African Book,” and completed it in 1956. He left this manuscript, along with those for A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, and The Garden of Eden, in a safe deposit box in Cuba. Under Kilimanjaro is the last of Hemingway’s manuscripts to be published in its entirety.

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One of my favorite genres of literature is adventure literature, especially when the subject is Africa. A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa is an excellent example.

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I was coming home from Key West Florida and had already finished everything I had taken to read. In the Key West Airport, I picked up a copy of To Have and Have Not. I finished half of the novel on the flight home to Birmingham from Key West. It is a quick and easy read.

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This is an enjoyable and informative read. There are two sections to the book, one is primarily about the history and the process of making an English side by side shotgun and what makes a gun a London “best gun”. The other part is about shooting with consistency.

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Theodore Rex is a well written and informative book about the Presidential years of Theodore Roosevelt. It begins in 1901 right before the McKinley assassination and ends after Taft takes office in March of 1909.

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“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”

- Napoleon Bonaparte

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“I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.”

- Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

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Tenth Legion is one of the best and most hilarious books I have ever read about turkey hunting. “Many people who hunt turkeys do so with an attention to detail, a regard for strategy, tactics, and operations, and a disregard for personal comfort and convenience that ranks second only to war. As for all cultists, it never occurs to them that they may be anachronisms. Supremely unconscious of the rest of the world, blind and deaf to logic and reason, they walk along their different roads in step to the music of their different drums.”

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African Game Trails is written by Theodore Roosevelt and is an account of a safari he took with his son Kermit in East Africa starting out in March of 1909 sailing from New York and ending in Khartoum in March of 1910. The purpose of this expedition was to collect birds, mammals, reptile, plants and especially specimens of big game for the The National Museum at Washington, the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History, New York.

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East of Eden was published in September 1952. It is the tale of two families, The Trasks and the Hamiltons. It is regarded as the most ambitious work of Steinbeck. The novel is packed full of themes that involve the human condition. Some of the major themes covered are depravity, love, struggle for acceptance and greatness, the capacity for self-destruction, guilt and freedom. Throughout the book these themes are tied together in a way that parallels the book of Genesis in the Bible, especially the story of Cain and Abel. The title of the novel itself comes from Genesis, Chapter 4, verse 16: “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the Land of Nod, on the east of Eden.”

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I enjoyed reading this book. It is not what I expected at all. Most of the books and literature I have read on fishing have either been technical or more often reflective essays or stories about the experience in more of a romantic or Zen kind of way. A lot of this book is about a ruthless pursuit by very wealthy and obsessed people that are chasing world records and how that, among other factors, helps destroy a wonderful fishery.

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Theodore Roosevelt was a true Renaissance man. He was an author, conservationist, naturalist, explorer, soldier, politician and sportsman. He published A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open in 1916, just four years before his death at age 60, he died of a pulmonary embolism in his sleep at his home at Sagamore Hill, in Oyster Bay, New York.

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It was a fine, bright day in August 1968, in The Sportsman’s Arms Hotel in Nanyuki, when W. Robert Foran knew death was coming. Calmly, he ordered a bottle of champagne and, raising a last toast to his eighty-eight years of life during which he had outlived all the legendary African big game hunters, he died, like the gentleman he always was.

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