American Buffalo
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American Buffalo
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Narrated by:
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Steven Rinella
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By:
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Steven Rinella
About this listen
From the host of the Travel Channel’s The Wild Within.
A hunt for the American buffalo - an adventurous, fascinating examination of an animal that has haunted the American imagination.
In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the odds - there’s only a two percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful - Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo’s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness.
American Buffalo is a narrative tale of Rinella’s hunt. But beyond that, it is the story of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped our national identity. Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo’s past, present, and future: to the Bering Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones amid artifacts of the New World’s earliest human inhabitants; to buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a “bone charcoal” plant that made fortunes in the late 1800s by turning millions of tons of buffalo bones into bone meal, black dye, and fine china; and even to an abattoir turned fashion mecca in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel.
Rinella’s erudition and exuberance, combined with his gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a quirky blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the natural world. Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.
©2008, 2009 Steven Rinella (P)2019 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
“This is some of the best writing on our great national beast since George Catlin - and that was in 1841. A real triumph.” (Bill McKibben, author The Bill McKibben Reader)
“This is a big-game hunting story like no other: Steven Rinella is in search of an animal, quite literally. But also historically, existentially, and maybe even spiritually. Follow him on this curious armed quest - and, like him, you will quickly find yourself immersed in the fate of our mightiest and most talismanic beast.” (Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder)
“Moving and downright funny...Rinella writes with authority about the process of turning a living creature into steak, and easily renders an enormous amount of historical and scientific information into a thoroughly engaging narrative.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
What listeners say about American Buffalo
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- ed
- 08-05-20
Excellent
I could listen to Steven Rinella read the phone book. Excellent story, told in a descriptive and informative way.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Eoin
- 16-11-20
Excellent great read
Loved it, great story about his buffalo hunt and a bit of history aswell
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Ashley Stead
- 19-07-21
Couldn’t stop listening
Very well written, could have easily listened to the whole book in one! Went and bought another book by Steve straight away as I love the way you get a story, history and philosophy lesson in one!
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Captain Toad
- 05-07-20
Great story telling
Anyone familiar with Steven Rinella will know this will be interesting and a great story. The book tells
The cultural and natural history of the Buffalo and how it’s been closely linked with human colonisation of North America. .
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- ashley
- 28-11-23
A great story and very informative
A great story and very informative. As someone who is not a hunter it is interested to hear what Steven went through.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Anonymous User
- 16-09-24
A tale woven with humour and worn with authenticity
I liked hearing Rinella’s tale through his early hunting days in childhood to his now more mature career, he has a theme of genuine love for the outdoors
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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- Fun and Games
- 14-09-20
Descriptive!
Nice homage to Bison Bison with a heavy dose of hunting and field butchering and a decent sprinkling of history and anecdote.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Joe Kelk
- 10-02-21
Captivating
I can't fault this one at all, I was hooked from start to finish. The mix of discussing the main event and the events that lead up to it along with stories of the buffalo are all fascinating. Rinella talks about conversations he has had with people about buffalo and the type of responses he got from people. I found this a great inclusion in the book because I found myself turning to co-workers, friends, family etc. and saying "hey did you know that buffalo...". Overall it's a fascinating book and I can't recommend it enough.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Amazon Customer
- 31-05-22
Brilliant
Steve nails this story. You can really picture every moment from him in New York to standing with the Indians at a kill.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Brian
- 07-01-20
Brilliant.
From start to finish it was riveting
It was if I was there on the trail with him
I've a new found respect for the hunt and the buffalo
Thanks.
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