Fishing 1 by 1

posted by admin on Jan 14

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal
Except for adding photographs and a new introduction, some minor editing, and a larger format, this collection of 14 thoughtful essays about fishing is the same as the 1976 edition ( LJ 4/1/76). Chatham’s coast is the Pacific from San Francisco to Vancouver, but he also writes about some inland rivers and lakes. He is a fly fisherman whose favorite quarry is salmon and steelhead, although his quest for sport has even led him after herring. Because of increased fishing and the damming of rivers and other environmental pressures, his writing documents an angling scene that may never happen again. Libraries that missed the earlier edition, particularly in the West, will want to purchase.
- Peter C. Leonard, Mt. Lebanon P.L., Pa.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
“…one of the best angling writers… I luxuriated in his brilliant, sensitive description of the West Coast and its fishing.” — Nelson Bryant - New York Times

“Chatham is an evocative, skilled writer.” — SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“Chatham’s one of the best angling writers in action today.” — Nelson Bryant/NEW YORK TIMES

“Some angling writers have traveled the world over in search of big fish, Chatham has cruised.” — Thomas McGuane, from The Prologue

Order The Angler’s Coast: Russell Chatham form Amazon.

posted by admin on Jan 14

Editorial Reviews

Charles Lindsay’s lens points inward as well as out. In Mentawai Shaman: Keeper of the Rain Forest, he captured his time living with an Indonesian tribal leader and hunter. Closer to home, Upstream explores his latest odyssey: five years spent roaming the American West with a fly rod in one hand and a camera in the other. Here we find photographer as predator, slipping unseen into an alien world to witness the hidden lives of his quarry, to understand his own stalking. The hunter-artist returns from his extended fishing trip with some of the most striking testimonials to an ancient pursuit ever seen. As with Ansel Adams’s photos, Lindsay’s landscapes of arid hills, big skies, and rushing rivers can be stark and ominous, but Lindsay infuses the lonely, wide-open spaces with a sense of possibility that only a living thing can provide: A sudden swirl in an opaque pool. A taught line whipsawing across a riffle. A dense hatch of mayflies rising above the surface. And then the chance, if brief, to greet the nearly unknowable denizen of another world–a fish miraculously to hand. There’s humor and futility, too: the inevitable bird’s nest of tippet and fly knotted around a willow. These are images that will enthrall fly-fishers and photography enthusiasts alike, matched with the peerless prose of outdoorsman-author Thomas McGuane.

“The face of creation takes in everything with a level stare . . . only in observation of nature can we recover that view. “–Thomas McGuane

A poetic exploration, in words and pictures, of the art and spirit of fly-fishing.

Charles Lindsay’s grandfather taught him to fly-fish when he was nine years old. Ever since, in pursuit of trout and solitude, he has immersed himself in the clear, rushing waters of the American West. Fly rod in hand, he participates in the ancient rituals between man and nature. At times photographing beneath the surface of the water, Lindsay literally enters the world of the trout. In this close observance of the cosmos within the river, he explores the fundamental relationship of all life to water.

The photographs in Upstream illuminate a primitive world of elemental beauty and fractured light-abstract and utterly in motion. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, with wilderness under siege and humanity increasingly removed from nature, Lindsay uses his camera to express the enduring vitality of the natural world. Thomas McGuane, avid fly fisherman, frequent contributor to Sports Illustrated and Riverwatch, and author of Ninety-two in the Shade, brilliantly explores these themes in his accompanying text.

Order Upstream: Fly-Fishing in the American West: Thomas McGuane, Charles Lindsay form Amazon.

posted by admin on Jan 14

Editorial Reviews

It’s no surprise, really, that a novelist of Craig Nova’s range should find himself as drawn to trout as he is to words. Both are uncertain and private pursuits with lots of time for contemplation, punctuated by plenty of setbacks and the occasional victory. Remarkably, each has a way of sustaining the other.

Nova’s memoir is, sadly, short, but the experiences he relates are anything but thin; anglers know there is just as much splendor in a game little fish as there is in one that’s trophy-size. On streams from Maine to the Catskills, he skillfully and revealingly connects his fly lines to his life lines: his courtship, his marriage, his daughters, his writing. In one remarkable set piece, he recalls in splendid detail a bizarre episode, complete with the absurd intrigue of overt threats and secret mail drops, in which he becomes the target of an interstate extortion plot; Nova finds solace through the anxiety as he befriends–and fishes with–the FBI agent assigned to his case.

Why, in the end, does angling hook him so? One memorably lovely passage explains the essence of the union: “During important events in my life, I have gone fishing for brook trout. What I got out of this was not just the absence of what was confining or upsetting, but the presence of another quality altogether: These fish are forever associated in my mind with the depths of thankfulness for good fortune, just as they always reminded me of beauty and a sense of what may be possible after all.” It is in that hopeful landscape of the possible that anglers–and writers–go to thrive. –Jeff Silverman

From Library Journal
Though Nova is the author of nine hard-edged novels, including The Universal Donor and The Book of Dreams, in this slim, likeable memoir he reveals himself to be a caring and sensitive spouse, parent, and outdoorsman. FishingAmostly for brook trout with a fly rodAhas been a constant throughout his adult life, and he credits it with enhancing whatever writing skills or virtues he might possess. He argues that flyfishing’s reflective nature lends intrinsic hopefulness and clear thinking to almost any proximate activity. The chapters cover meaningful events and relationships such as the impact angling had on his perseverance as a young, struggling writer and how fly tying helped him to evade his 12-year-old daughter’s questions about what it’s like to be in love. There’s also a harrowing tale about an extortionist that ends anticlimactically. Recommended for public libraries.AWill Hepfer, SUNY at Buffalo Libs.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Order Brook Trout and the Writing Life: Craig Nova form Amazon.

posted by admin on Jan 13

Editorial Reviews

Review
“A Good Life Wasted is a vicarious pleasure for anyone who has ever wondered, even once, what it would be like not to have a ‘real job’.”–Missoulian, July 10, 2003

“[Ames] writes 11 loosely connected stories, eloquently using the medium of angling to discuss the virtues of a lifestyle old timers used to describe as ‘trifling.’ Moving, thought-provoking, sometimes powerful, and always entertaining, this is an important and welcome addition to the literary side of the angler’s world.”–Library Journal, July 29, 2003

“Powerful at points, moving, thought-provoking, and always entertaining, this is an important and welcome addition to the literary side of the angler’s world.”– Library Journal

Told through the eyes of a longtime Montana fishing guide and itinerant fishing bum, A GOOD LIFE WASTED offers a unique perspective on an implausible period in the recent history of human civilization. When Dave Ames started guiding, Rocky Mountain locals rode horses and dug camas roots; now they’re trading stock options on cell phones. The collision of stone and computer ages was short-lived, but the deep-rooted themes of this book remain.
A chronicle and celebration of the fishing-guide life, A GOOD LIFE WASTED is a vicarious pleasure for anyone who has ever wondered, even once, what it would be like not to have a “real job.” The book is poignant and spiritual; it’s Blackfoot Indians and copper miners’ daughters; it’s fiddles and guitars and the fabric of space; it’s about what happens to wild people when the wilderness is gone.
From the first chapter–in which Dave Ames recalls bluffing his way into a job as a fishing guide to the rich and famous (after barely managing to suppress the overwhelming urge to go postal at the federal agency where he suffered his first, and only, “real” job in a cubicle farm)–we’re hooked. We gladly follow Ames as he describes the rite of tasting clouds of mating midges to better match the hatch, tells the story of a fabled Blackfoot fishing guide, and shares his further adventures as a guy with no job, no office, and no stress. A GOOD LIFE WASTED spins a fascinating, compelling web–a web that entices the deskbound salary slave to make a break for it, and head west to big sky and fast, cold water, ASAP.

Order A Good Life Wasted: or Twenty Years as a Fishing Guide: Dave Ames form Amazon.

posted by admin on Jan 12

Editorial Reviews

Logger, trapper, guide, magistrate, army officer, radio broadcaster, conservationist, and university chancellor, Roderick L. Haig-Brown, the multitalented Renaissance man of North American angling, considered himself first and foremost a writer. Given the overall quality, range, depth, and grace of The Seasons of a Fisherman, it would be awfully hard to argue. This marvelous volume, which collects four of his best-loved classics between one set of covers for the first time, should elegantly introduce Haig-Brown, who died in 1976, to a new generation of outdoors enthusiasts as it reintroduces him to his old angling friends.

Originally written in the early ’50s, the four books wade into an angler’s summer, winter, spring, and fall, and while each muses over what a particular season requires of the fisherman, none is just about fishing; Haig-Brown never limited himself. These books are about his beloved British Columbia, the environment as a whole, its repetitive rhythms, and the angler’s place in it. They are about fishing stories; the traditions of fly-fishing; and how to catch fish, tie flies, and observe the natural world. Fishing, in Haig-Brown’s cosmos, was more than just the pursuit of fish: it was the full, wide-ranging engagement of the mind and the senses.

Listen to the litheness of his prose from “Fisherman’s Spring,” the first of the four sections, as he ponders the worthiness of the endeavor:

It is … something more than a sport. It is an intimate exploration of a part of the world hidden from the eyes and minds of ordinary people. It is a way of thinking and doing, a way of reviving the mind and body, that men have been following with growing intensity for hundreds of years.

This is just a taste of what “Seasons” overflows with, as is this admission–is there an angler who can’t share it?–from “Summer”: “I am beginning to find it very salutary to remember just how much ‘happening right,’ if not downright luck, there has been in nearly all my little triumphs.” As a book, Seasons is a big enough triumph to become a dog-eared cornerstone of your fly-fishing library. –Jeff Silverman

From Library Journal
With spring within sight, fly fishers are beginning to inspect their gear carefully, feeling their lines for nicks and weak spots, testing hook sharpness, and checking waders for holes, all in anticipation of that first magic day out. Haig-Brown has long been a favorite read among anglers, and this volume combines his four standard volumes, Fisherman’s Spring (1951), Fisherman’s Summer (1959), Fisherman’s Fall (1964), and Fisherman’s Winter (1954), into a single, beautiful hardcover. Haig-Brown’s writings are always in season.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Order The Seasons of a Fisherman: A Flyfisher’s Classic Evocations of Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter Fishing: Roderick L. Haig-Brown form Amazon.

posted by admin on Jan 12

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
“It is a truism among anglers that the deepest affections attach to first waters. They become our private archetypes…. The images of people, the reflections of other times and places are mirrored in a silver surface, and fishing becomes a form of memory, and memory a form of return.” Angling essayist and Oregon State University English professor Leeson’s new collection of essays (after Habit of Rivers) returns to the waters he’s known since childhood, the spring creeks in southern Wisconsin’s pastoral “driftless country.” The landscape is an Ice Age geologic anomaly, untouched by glaciers and composed of narrow valleys, coves, hollows and small creeks full of trout. Leeson’s finely woven recollections and thoughtful meditations on the natural world drive these essays, as he considers everything from bees to Amish farms to the special qualities of trout fishermen. He recalls becoming a fishing fanatic at the age of 14, describes his favorite fishing companions (his brother and their old childhood friend, nicknamed “Lizard”) and tells of a medieval custom called “beating the bounds,” in which older villagers taught young boys the limits of their rural hamlet by banging their heads against trees and other boundary markers. Occasionally Leeson’s reveries drift into vague sentimentality, but for the most part he keeps them grounded with anecdotes and facts about the natural history and geography of his native region.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Spring creeks (streams rising from subsurface aquifers) loom large in Leeson’s angling life, even though less than one-thousandth of all trout water flows in them. This book’s 15 essays explore the spring creeks that Lesson has fished in “Driftless country” on the Illinois-Wisconsin border, a region mysteriously spared alteration by the great Wisconsin glaciers. Although spring creeks and Wisconsin geography are somewhat arcane subjects, Leeson brings them alive with style and insight in this remarkable memoir, one of the last books edited by angling great Nick Lyons. Leeson’s writing displays the same thoughtfulness and beauty evident in his first book, Habit of Rivers (1994), but this time the pace is faster, and there is more wit. Remarkably, there is no fishing in the book’s first third, and when Leeson does describe his forays into the spring creeks, it is always without jargon and with a vivid sense of place and context. The text is peppered with allusions to books and films (Hemingway and Hitchcock’s The Birds); marvelous reflections on Wisconsin farms, taverns, cows, and cheese; references to English writers Halford and Skues, also devotees of spring creeks; and even a touch of baseball. Like the best fishing books, his account transcends its topic; its audience should be not just those who read the great fishing writers (Lyons, Barich, Gierach) but also those who savor the nonfiction of Annie Dillard, John McPhee, and William Least Heat-Moon. John Rowen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Order Jerusalem Creek: Journeys into Driftless Country: Ted Leeson form Amazon.

posted by admin on Jan 9

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Nick Lyons presents Traver on Fishing, a treasury of essays and yarns by the author known as Robert Traver (pen name of former Michigan DA and judge John Voelker, who, following the success of Anatomy of a Murder, was able to retire from his legal work to fish full-time). Part personal experience and part fictional musings, Traver’s essays (many of them selected from his three previous fishing books: Trout Madness, Anatomy of a Fisherman and Trout Magic) are lyrical, insightful and as enticing as the trout he gamely pursues, most especially at his favorite spot, Frenchman’s Pond, with a tin cup of bourbon and a stogie.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Traver is required reading for every fly angler. Although he wrote almost entirely about his home waters in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, his words are still widely read with near reverence. Also famous for his court drama, Anatomy of a Murder (1958), Traver (the pseudonym for retired judge John D. Voelker) was a fine essayist and storyteller whose words remain fresh and funny. Nick Lyons provides a short introduction to this collection and then adds Traver stories from Trout Madness and Trout Magic (both available from Lyons Press) and the long out-of-print Anatomy of a Fisherman. Also included are Traver articles from several magazines and two profiles of the fisherman. Every library should have a copy of one of the author’s books, and this one provides an excellent introduction and selection of works. Highly recommended. Jeff Grossman, Milwaukee Area Technical Coll. Lib., Oak Creek
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Order Traver On Fishing (On): Robert Traver, Nick Lyons form Amazon.

posted by admin on Jan 3

Editorial Reviews

“There are many of us,” writes Nick Lyons, six decades on the pond behind him, “for whom a day on the trout river is so pleasant an event, such an amiable and engaging pastime, that it feels, both going and coming back, as comfortable as an old shoe. We go for the sheer joy of it, not to put notches on our rods.” Anglers keep returning to Lyons’s finely honed prose for precisely the same reason. The collection of essays that comprises My Secret Fishing Life is a personal journey into the various “rivers” he’s waded as a husband, father, teacher, writer, collector, publisher–and, of course, as a fisherman, the single noun that manages to tie all these lines together. The shorter pieces of the first half, many of which were originally published in Fly Fisherman magazine, explore subsets of the fishing life, drifting casually between philosophical rumination and memoir: the rituals of preparing for a new season, getting older, a lunchbreak spent fishing for stripers in the waters off Wall Street. In such sketches he presents his languid yet alluring phrases as delicately as if they were flies to a rising trout. Here he is on the inherent purity of the dry fly: “The only possible practical argument for using the dry fly more frequently is Lee Wulff’s–that the dry fly fished on a floating line grants for the trout the sanctuary of its part of the river, allowing the connection to take place only at that place where air and water meet, and only at certain times.” Two longer pieces comprising the book’s second half are less successful–maybe too personal here and there (especially a windy defense of his wife’s painting career), but overall it’s honest, thoughtful work. Like fly-fishing as a sporting enterprise, the writing casts more toward the journey than the destination, allowing itself to hook into a share of verities along the way. –Jeff Silverman

From Publishers Weekly
Within the pond of those who write about fly-fishing, Lyons is one of the bigger fish. He has authored 16 titles (In Praise of Wild Trout, etc.) on the evidently inexhaustible subject and has published others’ books on the art and mystique of fly-fishing. This is his most introspective book yet: “I have tried to find more of what my professional life has amounted to than ever before and more of my personal life.” That he had a personal life at all is amazing given that, for 13 years, he was a full-time editor at Crown, taught five courses at Hunter College (where colleagues looked askance at his fishing articles and books, unable to see what such low-brow pursuits had to do with his professorship), ghostwrote four books and continued with his own writingAand had four children. He later started a book-packaging firm, Lyons & Burford, which became an independent house; now he heads Lyons Press. Even so, Lyons found time to go fishing, and there are plenty of fish tales here, spiced with references to Hesse, Twain, Melville, Max Planck, Byron and others. Lyons succeeds at what he sets out to do: show how the various loves and obsessions of a life interlock. Fly fishers and publishing folk alike will welcome the effort. In a marvelous passage, Lyons describes his discovery of the voice with which he first wrote about fishing, as opposed to the one he employed as an English professor: the new voice was “earthy, nimble, wry, full of wit and worms and celebration.” He’s still got it.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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posted by admin on Dec 26

Editorial Reviews

As adept as Thomas McGuane has been through the years with a rod in his hand, he’s even more skillful with his pen. Join the two like tippet to leader, and the result’s as irresistible as a Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear in the middle of a Hendrickson hatch.

For The Longest Silence, McGuane has trolled his inventory and assembled 33 essays written over three decades. Passionate, meditative, personal, and often very funny, they are filled with fellowship and connected by his love of angling. The title piece, a certified classic in the sporting genre, chronicles his quest for the elusive permit. Since permit is about the hardest fish to catch on a fly, the expected futility of not catching one hooks McGuane’s introspection, and he weighs in with trophy prose: “What is emphatic in angling is made so by the long silences–the unproductive periods. For the ardent fisherman, progress is towards the kinds of fishing that are never productive in the sense of the blood riots of the hunting-and-fishing periodicals. Their illusions of continuous action evoke for him, finally, a condition of utter, mortuary boredom.”

That’s McGuane on angling in a nutshell; he knows the real action is internal. Whether he’s casting for salmon in Russia (”Fly-Fishing the Evil Empire”), bonefish in the Florida Keys (”Close to the Bone”), or trout in Ireland (”Back in Ireland”), the catch is secondary to the pursuit, and the pursuit has as much to do with making sense of self and the universe as it does with anything aswim in a river. “When you get to the water you will be renewed,” he assures. “Leave as much behind as possible. Those motives to screw your boss or employees, cheat on your spouse, rob the state, or humiliate your companions will not serve you well if you expect to be restored in the eyes of God, fish, and the river, which will reward you with hollow waste if you don’t behave. You may be cursed. You may be shriven. You may be drowned. At the very least, you may snap off your fly in the bushes.” McGuane clearly wades in with honest intentions; in The Longest Silence he casts cleanly to his target again and again. –Jeff Silverman
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Novelist McGuane (Nothing but Blue Skies, etc.) celebrates everything about angling in this collection of 33 essays, which is certain to entertain fellow enthusiasts and fans of his writing. Any notion that fishing is humdrum is dispelled when McGuane describes eloquently his lifelong love affair with the sport, from the joys of tying flies and testing different rods, to sharing ghost stories and observational gems with fellow anglers, to absorbing quietly life’s mysteries. He puts into historical and literary context the classic fishing writings of Izaak Walton and Roderick Haig-Brown. Throughout, McGuane’s awe at nature’s splendor shines in his prose. Releasing a trout after catching it becomes a moment of reverence: “Suddenly the fish was there, its spotted back breaking the surface, then up showering streamers of silver from the mesh of the net…. I stood in the river for a long while, holding him into the current and feeling the increasing strength in a kicking tail I could barely encompass with my grip. To the north, the Aurora Austral raised a curtain of fire in the cold sky. My trout kicked free and continued his journey to the Andes.” Such moments emphasize McGuane’s call for preserving the world’s rivers from overdevelopment. Whether he’s fishing for trout in a beaver pond in Michigan, salmon in Iceland or tarpon in Key West, McGuane casts not only his fishing line, but also his magic at turning a precise phrase and evoking a delightful image. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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posted by admin on Dec 12

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Smatterings of The Compleat Angler, The Bartender’s Guide and Dear Abby dot this homespun first collection of offbeat fishing tales by an inveterate Montana fly fisherman who casts his obsessive pastime out into the intellectual waters somewhere between high religion and tackle-shop tall tale. The opening story, “The Woolly Bugger,” recounts high points in the fishing life of a narrator who first wet a hook at age 10 in 1964 and projects his future into the year 2020. “True Love,” the concluding story, is a poignant little fable about the bonding of a married couple still fishing together after 35 years. From cutthroat trout in Montana to steelhead salmon in the Pacific Northwest and the bonefish and tarpon in the Caribbean, these seven stories involve ghosts, hippies, truck wrecks, hoe-downs, kinky libidos, marriage, parenthood, divorce and boozy friendship. The plots, which wander, and the prose, plainer than dirt, are almost incidental. The bait here is folksy philosophizing?just the thing to lure a tired, beer-numbed angler on a day when his rod is broke and the skeeters are biting.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
“True Love and the Woolly Bugger is adventurous and funny, and yet also poignant. In short, it’s not just a fishing book, but very much like life itself, and well worth reading, even by folks who have never made a cast.”
–John Barsness, editor of Gray’s Sporting Journal and Montana Time
— Review

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