This is the account of a man's initiation into the outdoors heritage of his home territory. Jim Kilgo was born and raised not to far from the bottomlands of the Great Pee Dee River in South Carolina, but it was not until he was grown that he began to respond to the powerful lure of the forests, fields, and swamplands of the South and the wildlife that inhabit them. For Kilgo, reentry into the wilderness becomes a window on the life that men can lead, within nature and out of it. His tales of hunting and fishing will delight anyone who has ever used rod or gun, yet by no means is this a book for devotees of hunting alone. What is rediscovered here illuminates the lives of human beings who, all to often unknowingly, are integrally part of the larger rhythms of nature and the seasons.

Reconciliation and remembering are the forces at work in Inheritance of Horses. In these essays, James Kilgo seeks the common ground between his roles as a man, as husband and father, and as heir to his family legacy. Pausing at mid-life to make an eloquent, understated stand against our era's rootlessness, he honors friendship, kinship, nature, and tradition. In the opening section, Kilgo focuses on the tension between his need for ritualistic male camaraderie and his familial obligations. Searching the woods for arrowheads, sitting around the dinner table at a hunting lodge, or careening down an abandoned logging road in a pickup, he seems ever-prone to the intrusions of domesticity and civilization: a sudden memory of miring the family station wagon in the sand on a beach trip, an encounter with a couple on their sixtieth wedding anniversary, a stream littered with trash and stocked with overbred hatchery trout. Restlessness and responsibility converge and again clash in the second series of essays, in which domestic themes are explored in settings that range from Kilgo's own living room to Yellowstone Park and the deep waters off the Virgin Islands. Through such images as a hornet's nest, a gale-force storm, a grizzly bear, and a marlin, Kilgo gauges the strengths and vulnerabilities of his family and moves toward an existence that is part of, not apart from, the women in his life. The long title essay composes the book's final section. Reading through a cache of letters exchanged between his two grandfathers, Kilgo recovers and revises his memories of them. What he learns of their open, passionate friendship reveals an essentially feminine aspect of their patriarchal natures, enriching, but also confusing, Kilgo's earlier understanding of who they were. As some of the more unhappy or unpleasant details of his grandfathers' lives come to light, they first heighten, then assuage, Kilgo's ambivalence about a family heritage built as much on myth as on truth. The manner in which Kilgo makes such intensely personal concerns so broadly relevant accentuates what might be called the "told," rather than the "written," quality of Inheritance of Horses. He is foremost a storyteller, working in a style that is classically southern in its pacing and its feel for the land, but all his own in its restrained humor and lack of self-absorption. Guided by a storyteller's respect for common people and common feelings, Kilgo never prescribes or moralizes but rather brings us to places where principled choices can be made about what we need and value most in our lives.

An account of the author's journey through Africa recounts his experiences as an observer during a big-game safari hunt, with local villagers, and in caves and overhangs, where he examined ancient cave paintings. (Travel)

From the threads of actual events, acclaimed essayist James Kilgo weaves a richly textured debut novel set in rural South Carolina in the early 20th century, telling the story of two brothers and their cousin, a mixed-race woman whom one brother loves--and the other dishonors.

"I'm Not a Giver Upper" is a book about our youngest daughter, Juliana, who fought cancer EIGHT TIMES. It is not a story, with every tiny detail because including all the details, of her life, would fill more than one book. My goal, in this book, is to show you her amazing courage and positive attitude, bring awareness to Pediatric Cancer and to keep her memory alive forever. I miss her so very much.

The tragedy of extinction is explained through the dramatic story of a legendary bird, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and of those who tried to possess it, paint it, shoot it, sell it, and, in a last-ditch effort, save it. A powerful saga that sweeps through two hundred years of history, it introduces artists like John James Audubon, bird collectors like William Brewster, and finally a new breed of scientist in Cornell's Arthur A. "Doc" Allen and his young ornithology student, James Tanner, whose quest to save the Ivory-bill culminates in one of the first great conservation showdowns in U.S. history, an early round in what is now a worldwide effort to save species. As hope for the Ivory-bill fades in the United States, the bird is last spotted in Cuba in 1987, and Cuban scientists join in the race to save it. All this, plus Mr. Hoose's wonderful story-telling skills, comes together to give us what David Allen Sibley, author of The Sibley Guide to Birds calls "the most thorough and readable account to date of the personalities, fashions, economics, and politics that combined to bring about the demise of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker." The Race to Save the Lord God Bird is the winner of the 2005 Boston Globe - Horn Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2005 Bank Street - Flora Stieglitz Award.

All who seek this elusive bird rely on this 1942 profile of the species' characteristics and habits including its original distribution patterns; history of its disappearance; feeding, nesting, breeding habits. 20 halftones, 17 tables, 22 other illustrations.

This work covers classic southern fiction - along with lesser-known works - with an eye to the ways that southern writers such as William Elliot, William Gilmore Simms, and William Faulkner depict hunting and outdoorsmanship. It explores the themes of honour, fair play, and noblesse oblige.

Gathers essays about the southern landscape and nature by eighteen writers with ties to the region

"I taught undergraduates for forty-five years (the last thirty at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee), and for most of those years I spent as much time as possible outside. I hunted as much as I could, and I fished some. I also spent time in the woods of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi just walking around looking at things that caught my eye and trying to understand. Outdoor life and academic life for me have been intimately connected, and this collection of essays explores that connection. The essays in Wedding the Wild Particular make plain the sheer delight I have taken in the primary world and the degree to which that delight has enriched my academic vocation. They make what I believe is a coherent argument for the importance of natural literacy in the intellectual life." --Robert Benson