Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been re-issued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English game-keeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional game-keeper. Unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeper.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Greatest book review of all time
From Field and Stream, November 1959
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4 comments:
You do realize that Ed Zern, who wrote it, was a brilliant satirist? His parody of James Corbett can still make me delirious...
I must, must, must read more of this man. Corbett parodies? I am jumping up and down in anticipation! Thank you for the recommendation. I'll do my best to get hold of some of his stuff.
The one with the Corbett parody is "To Hell with Hunting", from the fifties, when "Man Eaters of Kumaon &c were unlikely best sellers.
There is a big anthology of him from the eighties by one of the incarnations of Lyons Press-- I'll track it down
"Hunting and Fishing from A to Zern", Nick Lyons Books (Winchester Press), 1985. Very, very funny. I would say "the perfect thing for when you just want to read a bit before falling asleep" but then you laugh, and read another, and laugh, and read, then it is one in the morning and you're still not asleep.
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