Magazine writer Thomas's fly-fishing pieces are ``written more from the perspective of Alice in Wonderland than Joe Brooks.'' Which is to say, he skips lightly over the technical claptrap and gets right to the fun of fishing and the joys of the great outdoors. Always intrigued, Thomas ``senses that Alaska was too big just to visit'' and winds up living there for six years. Fishing the Great Land is a challenge, he writes, and means coping with ``bears, mosquitoes, foul weather, bush flying, giardiasis, and general despair.'' But the rewards of fishing remote spots along the Cook Inlet include 30-pound king salmon and savage strikes from rainbow trout ``intent on logging as much flight time as possible on the end of my fly line.'' An 80-mile tributary that flows into Bristol Bay is a ``bio-pageant'' that features rainbows, silver, king, and red salmon, grayling, and dogs, or chums. Montana, a place he's loved since a childhood trip, boasts a ``menu that varies from delicate spring creeks to brawling rivers.'' Thomas writes of fishing for trout on the Yellowstone River using muddlers and Wooly Buggers while his buddy tries ``his standard Yellowstone River cocktail—a Royal Trude preceded by a large Hare's Ear on a dropper.'' Nothing works until dusk, when the caddis fly hatch begins; it's as if the river's fish ``had all gone crazy at once,'' and they fish by feel and guesswork till well past dark. Thomas claims to have fished on every continent except Antarctica, and his travels have taken him to Siberia, where his guide, Sergei, baited his homemade pole with caviar; to Tierra del Fuego to fish the Strait of Magellan; and to Molokai'i, where he bow-hunted boars and axis deer and landed a dream weke, a hallucinogenic fish. Thomas generally eschews the pretentious literary/spiritualist tone common to the fly-fishing genre. He just goes fishin' and enjoys telling about it.
Pub Date: Feb. 14, 1996
ISBN: 1-55821-429-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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