January at Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor

January 3, 7:00 PMSoutheast MI Home & Living ExaminerJackie DiGiovanni

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Southeast MI Home & Living Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Cover art courtesy of 
Spiegel and Grau, a
division of the 
Doubleday Group 

The independent bookstore in the Westgate Shopping Center, Nicolas's Books is hosting an author visit on Wednesday, January 7, at 7 pm. Stop by and meet Steven Rinella, a native of Twin Lake, Michigan, and author of American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon.

From the publisher's website:

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 2 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.

Read the Award Winners

If you would like some help in picking out the next book to read, try the Awards page at Nicola's Books website. You will find links to American Book Awards, Man Booker Prize, Caldecott Medal, Newberry Medal, Edgar Awards, national Book Critics Circle Award, and more.

New Winter Hours

Nicola's Books is now open during their winter hours: Monday through Saturday from 9 am until 8 pm, and Sunday from 9 am until 5 pm. Their phone number is 734-662-0600.

Get Directions

Click here for a map to Nicola's Books.