By William A. Sodeman, Jr., MD, JD
Bird Dogs and Betty Cakes
By Tom Carney
Partridge Pointe Press, 160 pages, softback, $12.95
It is a pleasure to read this book. The New Yorker magazine used to have a section called the “Throes of Living” that reported the stranger than fiction day to day occurrences of ordinary folk. This book is essentially the throes of living the field sport life. Each of the thirty-six essays began its life as a column in the Oakland Press. The protagonists are the author, a field sportsman; his wife, a tolerant woman but not a field sports woman; their dog, loyalties divided, and an assortment of friends. They are engaged in some of what most of the rest of us do for entertainment and relaxation. It doesn’t work much better for them than it does for the rest of us. What the reader gets is an opportunity to step back and laugh with the Carneys and, in so doing, at him/her self.
You will laugh. There are serious moments of truth as the reader finds a personal parallel in Carney’s antics. Fortunately, there is a restoration of a sense of humor as a saving grace. I do qualify as an old coot, a geezer, and I have rooms of collected stuff all of which were problems until Tom Carney shared his with me.
There are serious issues and serious observations scattered in with the fun as “ ...bird hunting is not our passion; hunting with good bird dogs is.” There is one essay, “The Forever Question” devoted to the problem or issue of hunting. Carney makes a case for hunting becoming William Butler Yeats “terrible beauty” which alone makes this volume worth reading. RWOL
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