Customer Reviews

The Hunter's Guide to Accurate Shooting: How to Hit What You're Aiming at in Any Situation

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has some really good merits. It does give you some good shooting tips. It talks about aiming, position, trigger squeeze, equipment, practice, etc. I even used some of it's advice last fall to successfully complete a hunt. The books not bad, it's just not great. At least, it could have been a lot better. Not by adding more information, but buy trimming -a lot- of fat.

The first 7 chapters (about 1/4 of the book) are about the history of guns and various cartridges. Is it interesting? Sure. Does it help one become a more accurate shooter/hunter. Nope. Next, the author talks about equipment. Again, there is good information in there but it's surrounded by so much cruft that it can be hard to find the actual good advice hidden in the "look how much I know about guns and famous shooters".

Once you do get to the meat of it, he gives good advice and it's worth the read. It's obvious he has years of hunting experience and can probably teach a thing or two to anyone who feels they need this book. But there was so much superfluous information that I actually read 1/2 of this book and put it down for a year and half before finishing it this last week. The second half is more to the point, but he can still go off on tangents (even interesting ones like Annie Oakley and Ad Topperwien) that really don't equip you to become a better shot.

While this book is good, it should have been about 120 pages shorter and 1/2 the price.

This book was a big surprise! Not only was it jam packed with great information and experiences, it actually was very well written and enjoyable to read. Most of these info books are dry, many are useless or have very little new "meat". This one, I just could not put it down, like a great novel or account. Even the stuff that we have all seen before was enjoyable to read the way it was reviewed here. I highly recommend and I will be sending 2 of these off as gifts to my other hunting/ gun buddies.

"Books about guns abound. Books about shooting do not. ... This book is mainly for hunters who want to shoot better."

So opens Mr. Van Zwoll's 2002 attempt to rectify this situation.

Though few seem to realize it, the gun and hunting world desperately needs decent material on marksmanship. Competition shooters have it wired but these active and talented represent less than one percent of the gun industry.

This book addresses a good part of that unattended 99 percent and makes me optimistic, thus I see this glass as full. However, it's only a quarter, not half, full.

Wayne Van Zwoll has the credentials with solid shooting experience and a track record respectable enough to be considered for an Olympic team many years ago. He's also a good writer and active in the gun industry as a regular contributor to the gun press.

This guy should know better.

After railing against "gun books" and their lack of shooting material in the preface, Van Zwoll spends the majority of the first 200 pages of this 322 page tome discussing exactly the same thing as every other gun book, starting with a condensed history of gun development (A Shooter's Slice of History) and continuing with an overview of what equipment you should buy (Equipped for the Shot, Aiming.)

This is all interesting, but not on topic. The title promised to help teach us how to hit what we're aiming at, remember? There are a handful of interesting morsels.

Examples:

Page 135 discusses that the shooting standard for Civil War era Berdan's Sharpshooters was a 10 shot group at 200 yards with a radius from the bullseye no more than 5 inches.

Page 142-143 discusses why over-magnification is unnecessary and that iron sights can be shot just as accurately as optics:
"In prone competition, iron sight scores commonly come close to matching those shot with scopes. It's no trick to shoot groups under half an inch at 50 meters, and in favorable weather the better shooters punch quarter-inch one-holers. So it seems odd to me that hunters insist on setting variables at 8x to 10x to shoot animals the size of a Honda Gold Wing."

The chapter on zeroing was useful, but this is rather elementary. Van Zwoll also betrays his air of experience somewhat by showing how long he's been out of the game

p. 144, "If National Match shooters can lob .30-06 bullets into the V-ring at 600 yards ..."

High Power switched to the decimal target decades ago and High Power shooters are mostly using .223 (Service Rifle) and 6mm or 6.5mm (Match Rifle) cartridges. A few folks still shoot .308 but the only people shooting .30-06 are those shooting the John C. Garand match and that is done at 200 yards.

In discussing slings, he's aware of the useful CW sling (p. 227), but not it's improvement, the Ching. Eric Ching improved the CW while on the Gunsite staff and made it a production item and managed several reviews internationally by 1991, a full 11 years before this book went to print.

Is this information too hard to find? Entering "scout rifle" into Google seven of the first ten pages of the search, including the very first four sites listed, include detailed "5 W's" information on the design, including manufacturers. Eric Ching built a web site describing his invention before 1996. And gun writers criticize the media for sloppy reporting . . .

Still, Mr. Van Zwoll is one of the gun writers truly skillful enough to write such a book. And the shooting advice given was good.

Just finished the book, and though I managed to root out a few very useful nuggets, I had to plow through a lot of less-interesting stuff to do so.

It's not a bad book, but the title promises a different outcome than the book delivers.

The first half of the book is a history lesson in cartridges and calibers, and I can't find much of interest there in terms of shooting help.

Later, we get a few useful tips, but again, that info is surrounded by so much fluff and a lot of "dumb hunter" anecdotes that I'm not sure it's worth the time.

At one point, Zwoll invest many pages on shooting with a sling - and recommends a specific product - but then misses out; the only published photo shows us how NOT to use a sling, and he didn't bother to publish a photo illustrating the right position.

Something similar occurs when he discusses shooting positions, where - despite the importance of the shooting positions - he blazes through them in a couple pages, and offers few illustrative photos.

The book is an entertaining read, but it's hardly the ultimate "Hunter's Guide to Accurate Shooting."

This is the best book on shooting I've read in a long time. It's got a lot of highly practical information about how to shoot a rifle. The byline is descriptive and applicable: the book is mostly about how to hit what you're aiming at in any situation.

Van Zwoll's writing is engaging, a rarity for a book on this subject. It's easy to read yet it still imparts information that will help just about everyone. I would have preferred slightly less dissertation on different kinds of cartridges, but those sections are easy to skip and the remainder of the book more than holds on its own.

There was some good info here, but I was disappointed to find so much of the book (maybe half) is about rifle and cartridge history. I wanted more of a how-to book, not a history book.

Good reading book. It has a lot of detailed rifle shooting info. A great reference for the new rifle shooter. The book refreshes several shooting tips picked up over the years. Enjoy it.

If you like reading about guns and like hunting you can't beat this author for entertaining writing. How to shoot accurately is not that hard a subject. The things that you need to do are fairly straightforward. So a little side story about how archers who poached were spared from hanging to fight for the King with spectacular results are the kind of thing that make a winter's evening reading a delight. I recommend this book and anything else by this author.

Dr. Van Zwoll is an expert in the field of rifles, shooting and certainly elk hunting. The books section on rifle history is awesome and extensive, it also goes into some considerable detail on competitive target shooting. However I think the book could have been better at articulating some of its many good points with the use of good illustrations to help clarify them (for example preferable stock designs), but they were absent. I still often refer to Vin Sparano's outstanding book "The Complete Outdoors Encyclopedia" when I want a good diagram of what Mr. Van Zwoll is explaining in "The Hunter's Guide to Accurate Shooting", which is a disappointment. There were some good personal stories that he shared in the book. The book also has some good B&W photos of rifles and hunting trophies. Furthermore I think that many of the shooting tips discussed are geared more towards long distance shots/shooters typically encountered out in the Western U.S. area. As a hunter from the Northeastern U.S. these are not typical situations in my area where woods hunting is far more common.

Excellent book! Well written by an experienced and knowledgable shooter. Filled with common sense advice. An easy read. Useful for the shooter who knows it all as well as the beginner. Lacks lots of pictures to illustrate the principles, but I did not find this a problem as the writing is clear and comprehensible.