SWIMMING FOR OUR LIVES

Paulk, an avid fisherman, recollects a lifetime of adventures in this memoir.

Growing up in Georgia during the Depression and World War II, the author was always an avid outdoorsman, drawn to hunting and fishing. Here, he collects more than a dozen stories that largely revolve around his fishing escapades, which took him from the rivers of his native Georgia to exotic locales including Kona (in Hawaii) and Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo and Cabo San Lucas (in Mexico). For 25 years, he maintained an offshore sportfishing boat, Kingfisher, and chased one massive fish after another. Each tale is conveyed with an infectious enthusiasm: “There’s nothing like a very successful fishing trip for me,” he writes. Some of Paulk’s triumphs are genuinely impressive—he once caught a striped marlin in Southern California that weighed in at an extraordinary 219.5 pounds. In addition to the accounts of fishing victories, the author also discusses his time attending the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland (during which he met his wife, Patricia Ann Metzler), his service as Navy officer, and his efforts to promote natural conservation, especially as a founding member of the United Anglers of Southern California. This is an eclectic assemblage of memories related in a casual, anecdotal style—the author makes no attempt to present a chronologically linear autobiography. Readers may get the feeling that they’re listening to the cheerful stories of an old friend, someone with a vital lust for life. While the collection focuses on fishing, Paulk also chronicles his personal life, most movingly when discussing the manner in which he met Pat. His devotion to her is consistently endearing: “I was so fortunate to be married to her for almost sixty years. Yep, this old Georgia boy married way over his head. She was a winner in life, if there ever was one. I love her so much!” This excerpt encapsulates what is best and worst about this memoir—while it’s unpretentiously lightsome and ebullient, it’s also brimming with earnest banalities and cliches. Readers may wish the author had taken a turn from the relentlessly wholesome to address something edgier, or more searchingly reflective, or had shown less restraint. (“Oh, the stories we could tell—but won’t!”)

Ultimately, this is a narrowly personal book, teeming with Paulk’s own photographs and stories that won’t resonate with those outside of the author’s social sphere. (The book includes a guest essay from an old friend of Paulk’s, Charlie Hall, and a meditation on a talented fisherman, George Washington Perry, whom the author knew as a child in Georgia.) Readers will likely feel that they’re perusing the scrapbook of a complete stranger, followed by reels of his home movies. Impressively, this experience never becomes an onerous one—Paulk is too charming a storyteller to exhaust readers’ patience completely. But the book is best suited to an audience of those who already know the author well, and who are eager to hear the telling and retelling of his recreational exploits.

A remembrance too idiosyncratically personal to resonate with a wide readership.