Cheap In Season: A Louisiana Falconer's Journal (Book) (Matthew Mullenix) Price

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Customer Reviews of In Season: A Louisiana Falconer's Journal

Through A Naturalist's Eye
One of the things I truly enjoy about reading is seeing our shared world through another's eyes. In my opinion, that's what the best writing gives us. <
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>Mullenix's eyes see a world of variety and wide scope -- a world of nature that is shrinking as development impinges. His spare words are deftly combined to convey a place, a character, a passion, a sadness. <
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>He contemplates his world through his own and his primary character's eyes: Charlie the Harris' hawk. What he reveals is a falconry hunting season's worth of descriptions of the hunting itself, and the place that hunting holds in both his and Charlie's world, which is the Bayou Country of Baton Rouge. <
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>While it is written by a falconer, there are aspects of his essays that hold immediate relevance to anyone interested in the wild world that surrounds us and the species that co-habitate that world with us. He simply and without editorializing describes the difficulties he's had explaining the concepts of hunting, eating, and dying to his three-year-old twin daughters; how his own passion for falconry impinges on his spouse and his boss; the internal debate where passion overshadows reason and we all do things we later regret; and the loss of habitat in his own environs -- habitat as important for his wild neighbors as for himself. <
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>Mullenix, however, doesn't try to solve the problem of human expansion into wild areas; he doesn't even rail against the system. He looks at the fact with a raptor's eye, in crystal clarity, and one expects, with a tear. <
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>Not all is gloom and doom, as the Naturalist's Eye surveys the cycle of life, of seasons, of hunting and not-hunting, of living and dying, of the ways our disparate lives intersect with one another. It combines the hunter writer into an entity sought by the naturalist in all of us, and confirms our suspicion that we've also been a character in the book all along.