“What is fly fishing? Everything.” Anglers will find Tomine’s book a spirited defense of that thesis.
A die-hard fly fisherman reflects on the glories of angling and his role in diminishing the natural world.
“Fishing was never a sport, a pastime or hobby for me. It was, and continues to be, who I am.” So writes Tomine, who has been fishing the Skykomish and other northwestern rivers since he was a kid. He was so obsessed that on Sundays, his single mother, a graduate student, would take him to the river and, as he cast his lines, do her homework while waiting in a parking area nearby. In this collection of his writings in sports and fishing journals, Tomine recounts some of his excellent adventures. In one shaggy dog story, he recalls being in a van in Russia in which was hidden a block of Swedish cheese so stinky that it ignited a pitched battle over which of the fishing adventurers had farted. In a less unpleasantly odorous tale, the author praises an Argentine barbecue during which his plate held “a significant fraction—like one fourth to one half—of an entire animal.” Tomine’s principal goal is to bag steelhead trout, of which he writes with affection and intelligence. His principal opponent throughout is a bureaucratic system that stocks the rivers of the Pacific Northwest with hatchery-bred trout, which crowd out wild fish even with the removal of dams on those streams. “If the point of dam removal is wild salmon recovery,” he asks, “why would we spend millions of dollars on something that works counter to the point?” Tomine ponders how climate change is affecting fish populations, wild and hatchery-grown, and his own role as a world traveler in putting down a heavy carbon footprint on the land. Mostly, however, the pieces are easily digested celebrations of the easy freedom of being on a river, rod and reel in hand.
“What is fly fishing? Everything.” Anglers will find Tomine’s book a spirited defense of that thesis.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952338-07-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Patagonia
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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