A Sportsman's Journey lyrically and spiritually connects readers with the natural world. Donald C. Jackson explores the rhythms and ways of hunting and fishing, particularly in America’s Deep South, and in so doing helps readers understand and find meaning in why hunters and anglers venture far afield. Journeying alongside the author, readers will savor the magic of sunrises and the mystery of twilight. Hearts will quicken as deer drift from shadows and ducks circle a woodland pond. The ocean will challenge them as they fight large fish from the deck of a wave-tossed boat far out at sea. Restless winds will whisper messages during a spring squirrel hunt on a Mississippi farm. Bird dogs, old guns, old friends, and times shared with loved ones will remind anglers and hunters of those special, shared memories. Ancient forests and powerful rivers remind us of our fragile, ephemeral state. Quail hunts strengthen cherished relationships with companions. Encounters with a mountain man will take us into a world thought to have vanished generations ago. A gathering of anglers on a Gulf Coast fishing pier at night reminds us of those hidden communities that exist around us, and are often unrecognized or perhaps even unknown. Jackson reveals how all of us depend on the natural world and share very personal interactions with it and with each other. This book reminds us that rediscovering, resurrecting, and celebrating these primal linkages are the real reasons we explore the world.

A lifelong outdoorsman and teacher's accounts of the powerful bond between nature and humanity

From the 1890s until the 1920s, a great tide of literary invention swept Ireland. As the country struggled for political independence, the writers who formed the Irish Literary Revival created a new, authentically Irish literature. Some, such as W. B. Yeats, John Synge, and Lady Gregory, celebrated the mystical tradition of Ireland's west; others, such as Sean O'Casey, explored Dublin's crowded streets and tenements. This fascinating, revealing, and beautiful book examines the relationship between these writers and the towns and countryside that fueled their imaginations. Part history, part biography, and part travel guide, A Journey into Ireland's Literary Revival takes the reader to Galway, the Aran Islands, Mayo, Sligo, Wicklow, and Dublin. Along the route, it visits the cottages and castles, crags and glens, theaters and pubs where some of the country's finest writers shaped an enduring vision of Ireland.

Trundling along in essentially the same form for some 220 million years, turtles have seen dinosaurs come and go, mammals emerge, and humankind expand its dominion. Is it any wonder the persistent reptile bested the hare? In this engaging book physiologist Donald Jackson shares a lifetime of observation of this curious creature, allowing us a look under the shell of an animal at once so familiar and so strange. Here we discover how the turtle’s proverbial slowness helps it survive a long, cold winter under ice. How the shell not only serves as a protective home but also influences such essential functions as buoyancy control, breathing, and surviving remarkably long periods without oxygen, and how many other physiological features help define this unique animal. Jackson offers insight into what exactly it’s like to live inside a shell—to carry the heavy carapace on land and in water, to breathe without an expandable ribcage, to have sex with all that body armor intervening. Along the way we also learn something about the process of scientific discovery—how the answer to one question leads to new questions, how a chance observation can change the direction of study, and above all how new research always builds on the previous work of others. A clear and informative exposition of physiological concepts using the turtle as a model organism, the book is as interesting for what it tells us about scientific investigation as it is for its deep and detailed understanding of how the enduring turtle “works.”