U.S. Navy veteran Peter F. Crowley presents Outdoor Follies: Humor and Adventures in the Outdoors, a compilation of chuckle-inducing fictional outdoor stories and three true outdoor adventure stories. Many of the tales revolve around hunting, though fishing, outdoor cooking, camping, and even canoeing are among the activities that make for memorable settings. A fine "outing" of wit, wisdom, and folksy charm; most of the tales are sufficiently brief to be suitable for reading aloud in a tent or around the campfire.

---Michael Dunford, Reviewer
The Midwest Book Review

     Anyone who has jumped a widening ice crack on Lake Superior or faced a lightning storm while fishing in a boat will enjoy a book written by Peter F. Crowley of Ashland.
     "Outdoor Follies" is a collection of true and fictitious stories, with most of them about catastrophes along the Lake Superior shoreline.
     "How is this guy still alive?" I thought after reading the book.
     From a journey in a makeshift canoe on a swollen creek in Ashland as a kid to a friend's near drowning experience on a lake trout fishing trip when snowmobiles broke through the ice, Crowley certainly has suffered enough misadventures to fill the 175-page book&
     Outdoorsmen will relate. "If you're like most people, you'll find yourself somewhere in these stories," Crowley said.

---Ralph Ansami
The Daily Globe, Ironwood Michigan

     In a time when hunting and fishing stories typically focus on what was shot or caught, a new book has hit the shelves that reminds us all to focus on the experience of being in the outdoors, not just on the possibility of bringing home a trophy . . .
     Interspersed throughout "Outdoor Follies," between the humor-driven tales, are several true and thoughtfully-told stories, dealing with everything from escaping injurious harm during a test drive of a new boat, to encouraging his teenage son to stay in the woods long enough to bag his first buck.
     Though his touch with humor is what makes this book shine, Crowley manages to tell these more serious stories in a light enough manner that they only help to round out an already worthy read, rather than weigh it down . . . 
     With that in mind, "Outdoor Follies" is heartily recommended for sportsmen and women alike who have become bogged down with the artificial expectation that an adventure in the woods or on the water is only a success if the game bag or cooler is full on the trip home.

---The Lakeland Times, Minocqua, Wisconsin.

     Don't go fishing with Peter Crowley
     Don't hunt with Crowley. Don't camp with Crowley. Don't ever get into a boat with Crowley.
     I haven't even met the guy and he gives me the willies ... 
     ... Crowley goes through great lengths to detail a lifetime of preventable blunders
     ... Reading about his misfortunes is like going to a horror movie. You know if the floundering female heroine insists on opening that cellar door festooned with spider-webs, bad things are going to happen
     ... With any botched outdoor venture, the pleasure lies in the retelling, and Crowley, a more adept hunter and angler than the book's title would suggest, does an admirable job as campfire raconteur ...

Jim Lee
Wausau Daily Herald
Gannett Wisconsin Newspapers May 27th, 2007

     Anyone who has ever spent a reasonable (or unreasonable) amount of time in the great outdoors has accumulated their own personal store of sportsman's war stories ...
     There is a great literature in these tales, thanks to immortals like Pat McManus and Cory Ford ...
     Keeping the fine tradition of the hot stove story alive is Ashland author Peter F. Crowley. Crowley, who grew up when in Ashland during the golden decade of the 50's, when a kid could get away with a lot of stuff, like canoeing down a flood swollen Bay City Creek with a terrified friend, headed for sure death in a pitch black railroad bridge tunnel. 
     "I decided I'd take it like a man . . . screaming with my eyes clenched tightly shut. Then when we didn't immediately capsize, I tentatively opened them. It was unbelievable! Completely and totally black! The sounds of cascading water which was magnified by the echo effect of The Tunnel, was like a thousand screaming demons from Hell. At that moment I was certain I was going to die, either from drowning or fright."
     That's the tale that sets the general tone of the book. Crowley recounts a number of disasters, great and small which have been his faithful companions over a lifetime misspent in the outdoors. . .

----The Daily Press, Ashland, Wisconsin.

     Pete Crowley is an incredibly lucky man. Over a span of more than 50 years, he has braved thin ice, intense storms and treacherous swamps in search of adventure in Wisconsin's North Woods and has somehow managed to survive one serious mishap after another. He has broken through the ice miles offshore on Lake Superior, fallen head-first from the top of a spruce tree and nearly drowned while trying to climb back into his still-moving boat after it threw him overboard at full throttle.
     As you might have guessed, Crowley himself was the cause of most of these mishaps. He not only survived them, he turned them into a howling collection of stories, some of them frightenly true, some outrageously fabricated. The mishaps he recounts in the few stories that purport to be factual suggest there has been no shortage of such events to draw from as he crafted those that stretch the truth.
     Crowley spins a good yarn, and he has a knack for dragging the reader along, as one unlikely event follows another on the way to an almost-believable outcome. Through them all, Crowley portrays himself as stalwart woodsman, cunning hunter of everything from mice to bears, and bumbling fall guy for whom just about everything that can go wrong does. If Murphy hadn't already claimed that law, Crowley certainly could have.
     If you have ever stayed one cast too long on the water, slogged one mile too far up the trail or thrown one too many logs on the fire, then it's a safe bet you'll find yourself in some of Crowley's misadventures. They offer us many lessons, the greatest of which might be that sometimes the best we can hope for is a good laugh.

---Dan Small PhD, Producer, Outdoor Wisconsin Television