Customer Reviews

Use Enough Gun: On Hunting Big Game

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

 

 

If you've ever dreamed of the Africa of old, the "classic" Safari days of endless game and gentlemen hunters, this is your book. Robert Ruark is genuis, from the opening page you are drawn into the book page after page, you will lose sleep until you are finished with this gem because you simply won't want to put it down ! It is almost as is if you can smell & hear the Africa Ruark describes, and "feel" the charge of a Cape Buffalo , Lion or Leopard. You will want to read this book again & again & it just get's better each time. The only book Ruark wrote that might garner a higher rating is "Horn of the Hunter", on a personal suggestion by Harry Selby ( Ruarks friend & "White Hunter", a professional hunter without parallel ). You will NOT be dissapointed with "Use Enough Gun" or "Horn of the Hunter" ..

Probably the best book I have ever read on hunting during the glory days of safari hunting in Africa. Ruark takes you hunting for the African "Big 5" through the eyes of a first timer. He writing is easy to read and keeps you interested at all times. If you're a hunter, you'll wish you where there! Not for members of PETA.

I found a first printing of this book in an obscure little shop and being an avid reader of african hunting books i picked it up.As I began to read it i could not put it down until it was finished,and i might add it took my breath.Ruark put his superb writing talent to good use in telling of his adventures hunting buffalo and africa's other exciting game.

This book perhaps contains the cream of the crop, utilizing pieces of other works. If you have no other work of Ruark's, you would enjoy this one. The best part for me was a small section of magazine articles (not footnoted as to actual date and publication) that I haven't found elsewhere.

Its easy to put yourself alongside the fire with Bob as you read, look through his eyes, and feel the bite of thorns, and the pride in shooting well, and the reward of matching wits with Mbogo.

The true African safari is slowly but surely diminishing but will forever be imprisoned by Ruarks great flair for describing the hunt and Africa as it once was. Use Enough Gun will keep the true old African hunting safari alive forever.

Robert Ruark is among the finest outdoor writers of our century. If you want to go on safari and can't afford it, buy "Use enough gun" or " Horn of the hunter". You will have the experience of hunting in the African Veldt with the best.

This book gives several very good stories of safaries by mr. Ruark himself, and a few of others. A good read, a bit dated as we view the shooting of animals somewhat different now, but very enlightening for that age.

One of the truely great writers. I love this book, almost as much as Horn of the Hunter. Here is what I think is his best--The hunter's horn sounds early for some, I thought, later for others. For some unfortunates, prisoned by city sidewalks and sentenced to a cement jungle more horrifying than anything to be found in Tanganyika, the horn of the hunter never winds at all. but deep in the guts of most men is buried the involuntary response to the hunter's horn, a prickle of the nape hairs, an acceleration of the pulse, an atavistic memory of his fathers, who killed first with stone, and then with club, and then with spear, and then with bow, and then with gun, and finally with formulae. how meek the man is of no importance; somewhere in the pigeon chest of the clerk is still the vestigial remnant of the hunter's heart; somewhere in his nostrils the half-forgotten smell of blood. there is no man with such impoverishment of imagination that at some time he has not wondered how he would handle himself if a lion broke loose from a zoo and he were forced to face him without the protection of bars or handy climbable trees.
Man has found it exceedingly diffcult lately to decipher the weird incantations and ceremonies which surround the provision of meat and shelter for his spawn. He is mystified by the cabalistic signs of the economist. He does not understand billions of dollars in relationship to him and his. Parity baffles him; the administration of ceilings and floors and controls and excises and supports does not satisfy his meat urge or his aesthetic reponse to the chase, when the hunter's horn of necessity rouses him.
But he can understand a lion, because a lion is life in its simplest form, beautiful, menacing, dangerous, and attrative to his ego. A lion has always been the symbol of challenge, the prototype of personal hazard. You get the lion or the lion gets you. Thank you.

I would hate to be dropped in the middle of an Australian desert with him (if he was still alive) as he is a terrible braggard.

After rereading the book, I find it a better story. I enjoyed it.