Taking Aim: Daring to Be Different, Happier, and Healthier in the Great Outdoors

In this sprightly, instructive autobiography, Shockey describes her love of hunting. Having originally studied to be a dancer like her mother, one day she asked her father, host of Jim Shockey’s Hunting Adventures, to teach her to hunt and she never looked back. Shockey now cohosts her father’s show; she also serves as a hunting ambassador and as a corporate spokeswoman for hunting products, including a compound bow for women that she helped design. Hunting, she writes, is no simple walk in the woods: “Hunting encompasses every single moment leading up to the one in which you take the shot.” She details the hours-long hikes, the cheek-chafing cold, the patience (“hair-pulling stretches of monotony”), and the constant practicing required to “harvest” that 1,500-pound bull moose. She endures antiwoman and antihunting attitudes, defending hunting as an act of conservation, self-reliance, and, often, charity. Along with her persuasive arguments, Shockey (writing with A.J. Gregory) provides lyrical narration and descriptions laced with humor and gratitude to God in this fine autobiography. Agent: Whitney Gossett, the Fedd Agency (Aug.)