Fox hunting commands attention. It is still the subject of controversy, especially in England. But Thad Sitton's book is removed not only from the English context, but also from any real connection to fox hunting in the traditional English equestrian sense. Indeed, Sitton's allusions to the history of English fox hunting seem cursory, and are largely unnecessary. This is the story of a distinctly American breed of fox hunting. It is the auditory history of men listening to hound “music” in the dark, and a history of the killing of American fox hounds. Death abounds in this narrative, but it is rarely the death of foxes. Hounds were subject to accidental deaths, purposeful deaths, and brutally wanton deaths. Paradoxically, it is also a book about human–animal bonds: the strong identification of hunter with hound.

There are three essential observations in the narrative. First, the majority of hunters were reluctant to kill foxes, and indeed most fox hounds seemed incapable of catching them. To that end, this brand of fox hunting is more appropriately styled “fox chasing.” The chase was everything to the men who followed it. Second, the chase took place mainly at night. Men “followed” their hounds by listening to their peculiar “voices” – the hound “music” – in the dark. Interpreting this “music” was the fox chasers' art, knowing hounds by voice, running with them only in their minds. Finally, this process essentially involved the identification of man with animal, “where men took the names of animals, animals took the names of men, and men projected themselves into animals in the chase” (208).

The majority of the book is entirely contained within this mysterious world of the fox chasers. Sitton is often reluctant to interpret or analyse that world, implicitly subscribing to its mystery, its magic, and the “strange” nature of those men whom it defined. Fox-chasing culture, particularly before World War II, is presented as isolated, esoteric and bewildering to all but the sport's aficionados, and is therefore not a good lens for studying American social history, precisely because it was so removed from social life. Instead, the book could have made direct connections with the literature of two rapidly growing fields of enquiry – history and theories relating to masculinity, and multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to human–animal relations – that might have better informed the interpretation of its sources. Sitton makes overtures in the direction of a historical anthropology, to which the sources seem well disposed, but the analysis of anecdotal evidence is uncritical, and the narrative stops short of an interpretive or “thick” description. The mention of Clifford Geertz's concept of “deep play” seems misapplied in the conclusion (but could have been very successfully applied throughout with regard to the overwhelming risks of personal and financial loss, compared to the tenuous and mysterious benefits of the chase).

The history of the fox hound itself is fascinating. Fox-chasing men ruthlessly culled those hounds that did not make the grade, either as pups or after feeling the shame of a dog that “quit” (returned early from the chase). The survivors were the artificially selected few. Those survivors were then subject to the perils of the dark, including wire fences, steel and cyanide traps, speeding cars, coyotes, and even alligators. Most distressing for the fox chaser was the shooting of hounds by deer preservers. The fox chaser's capacity to distinguish between types of death, and to discriminate morally between different forms of the brutal treatment of dogs, is remarkable. The love–death relationship of hunter and hound presented here should be of profound interest to scholars of past and present human–animal relations.

The book's strongest contribution is its postwar contextualization of the demise of traditional hilltop fox chasing (chapter 5). The modern chase was subject to government agency ineptitude and shortsightedness in environmental intervention; changing conceptions of property rights and terms of access to private land; the development of fast roads and the proliferation of the car; the eastward spread of coyotes; and the reintroduction, protection and “Disneyfication” of deer. Sitton details the tensions (and violence) caused by the pressures of modernity, ably describing how isolated islands of fox-hunting culture were engulfed by the forces of the American ecosystem, its politics and its prejudices. Its adherents went down fighting. Going quietly into the night, it is eminently clear, was not the fox chaser's strong suit.