Elegiac tribute to the elusive art and ineffable pleasure of fly-fishing, with plenty of information about how it’s done by...
Passionate angler Gierach (No Shortage of Good Days, 2012, etc.) once again trolls for like-minded readers.
In his 17th book on fishing, it remains “all about the fish and the beautiful places they live.” Gierach tells of going after elusive aquatic wildlife with rod and reel, lure and spoon, hook and hackle in such attractive precincts as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Wyoming’s North Platte, remote Labrador and frigid Manitoba, as well as at home in Colorado. Serious camping with knowledgeable outfitters, erudite guides, stoic lodge keepers and proficient companions fills his trip logs. The author also provides notes on fishing etiquette and stream hydrology, and he seems to remember every cast and every one that got away. He writes convincingly of trying to outwit cutthroats, rainbows and steelhead. The writer’s single-minded devotion to his fisherman’s M.O. in those pretty mountain streams naturally won’t mean much to piscatorial agnostics who never had the pleasure of outsmarting a trout in its home environs. With rhapsodic prose about “a small hare’s ear and partridge soft hackle,” “fifty-pound fluorocarbon shock tippets,” and “an old Burkheimer rod loaded with a 550-grain Skagit head, a two-foot cheater, ten feet of T-14 sink tip and a four-inch-long Intruder fly with big lead eyes,” all this is reserved for the legions of devout anglers. Certainly, there are many sweet, folksy passages on ichthyology and the cultural anthropology of those folks who take so happily to the outdoor life, yet the book remains primarily a fisherman’s testimony to the faithful. “Even on those rare days when you trudge off to a trout stream not so much because you want to, but because your livelihood depends on it,” writes Gierach, “you have a better day at the office than most.”
Elegiac tribute to the elusive art and ineffable pleasure of fly-fishing, with plenty of information about how it’s done by true practitioners.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1831-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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