Convinced —nobody knows beans— about why fish bite, Dennis (A Place on the Water, 1993) eschews the usual nuts and bolts of fishing in favor of entertaining personal essays laced with good humor and middle-age nostalgia. The author, who recently moved to a farmhouse on a peninsula in Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay, writes that the concept of home tends —to expand as we grow older . . . to include the rivers and lakes where we fish and boat, the woods where we hunt and hike, every place that has emotional and historical significance.— The wistfulness behind that statement keynotes many of these pieces. In —A Trout for the Old Guy,— Dennis comes across a cigar box full of dry flies tied by a crotchety old fisherman he hadn—t thought about in 25 years. Elsewhere, he notes that there are three days of fishing he never misses: opening day, for obvious reasons; the great Hex hatch on Michigan’s rivers in late June, and the last day of the season, that final day to —be taken slowly, like a last meal.— Dennis has some fun discussing good fishing buddies and what qualifies them as such, and he takes dozens of 24-inch rainbows from the Rio Puelo in Chile, along with a 5-pound brook trout, —as bulky as a steroid junky.— One of the best pieces, and by far the funniest, is —Fish Naked,— wherein he pokes fun at the sartorial correctness of catalogue-outfitted anglers. He harks back to a 1970s trip to the Firehole in Yellowstone National Park when he and a friend happened on a naked man and woman fishing side by side. —Maybe nude angling was a local tradition. . . . Maybe it was a tactic. . . .— Not quite up to his earlier efforts, but Dennis’s descriptive writing and his sense of fishing as serious fun keeps this one afloat. (illustrations)
Pub Date: June 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18594-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
A delightful collection of articles marking the 100th anniversary of one of the country's best and most durable hunting and fishing magazines. As Merritt (Goodbye Liberty Belle, not reviewed) suggests in his introduction, a key to Field and Stream's longevity has been its emphasis on conservation issues, its editorial stance against encroaching industrialism, and its support of measures like uniform game laws. Founded in St. Paul, Minn., by John R. Burkhard, the magazine underwent a series of moves and name changes before landing in New York City. The pieces gathered here represent some of the very best writers in the business: Havilah Babcock, Robert Ruark, Nash Buckingham, Nick Lyons, and others. Ed Zern's waggish 1964 piece reveals that The Compleat Angler, which he found unreadable, is actually ``a turgidly political allegory'' intended to challenge the Cromwellian regime. In one of Lyons's entries we meet a legendary ``old Catskill trouting genius'' with a magic formula ``for dyeing leaders to within a chromophore of the color of eight different streams at a dozen different times of the year.'' One of the most wonderfully written articles is by a rare early female intruder in this dominantly male world: Florence A. Tasker's 1908 ``A Woman Through Husky-Land'' recounts her five- month, 4,000-mile canoe trip from Hudson Bay to the Atlantic Ocean. While there's but one piece by Zane Grey, it's a good one on fishing for horse mackerel off the Santa Barbara Islands. But the best comes from the revered Babcock, perhaps the most elegant writer ever to grace the pages of an American sporting journal. In ``When a Man's Thoughts Are Pure,'' he sets gun aside to observe quail taking a dust bath: ``I have lain in the brush and watched an entire bevy, one after another in orderly fashion, perform its fluttery ablutions.'' Marvelous reading for hunters, fishers, and naturalists. (8 pages color illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55821-288-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
A slow-moving but enjoyable appreciation and history of pitching and pitchers. Curran (Big Sticks, 1990, etc.) examines the position's evolution against the backdrop of baseball's growth, the improvements in equipment and ballparks, and its ever-changing rules. As he traces the origins of organized baseball back to the 1845 New York Knickerbockers' gentlemanly rules and regulations, he observes that the pitcher's job then was to lob a hittable ball to a batsman who was allowed to specify its location. Curran follows rules changes regarding distance from mound to plate, size and elevation of the mound, the positioning of the catcher, and the composition of the ball itself, showing how the game was affected both obviously and subtly. As late as 1882, pitchers were still required to throw underhand, though they were ``permitted to confound the batter with speed and curves.'' The author takes a fascinating look at batting averages and earned-run averages in light of rules changes and during times such as the ``dead ball era'' of 1901 to 1919. He scarcely touches on the modern era, but does justice to pitchers such as A.G. Spalding, who won 207 games for the Boston Red Stockings in the 1870s and was one of the game's first superstars, and Bobby Mathews, whose ``mystery pitch'' (i.e., spitball) won 298 games for the Tammany Hallsupported Mutuals in the 1880s. While Curran's digressions often stall the book's progress, he offers entertaining, if brief, profiles of such greats as Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Rube Waddell, Kid Nichols, Bob Feller, and Dizzy Dean. He also takes an amusing look at a few of the game's flakier pitchers, including Moe Drabowsky and Mark ``The Bird'' Fidrych, and provides a historical, statistical, and pop-psychological analysis of left-handers. Fun and informative, though the slackadaisical writing style eventually proves tiresome. (16 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-58841-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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