Stuffed full of trivia, data, lore, and anecdote—a pleasure for any fan of trout fishing.
The prolific author returns to an old love: angling for trout.
“Any day fishing on a wintry river is a great day,” writes Kurlansky, refuting Tolstoy’s grumpy assertion that angling is “a stupid occupation.” His river of choice is the appropriately named Salmon, in central Idaho, where the water flows so swiftly that Lewis and Clark named it the “River of No Return.” It’s not open in winter, notes the author, but there are other wintry rivers where one can test “the only two rules of fly fishing that cannot be broken: you cannot fall in and you must keep your fly in the water as much as possible. Everything else depends on circumstance.” This being a book by Kurlansky, who never met a fact he didn’t like, the narrative turns from his experiences as a fisherman to a more universal history. First come the fish themselves, the salmonids, which people have been harvesting for millennia. Only one of those species is a true trout, namely Salmo trutta, the brown trout, with every other kind of trout so called only because they resemble it. The author then moves on to the “acclimatization” projects of the French and the British, “an imperialist concept in an age of Empire,” whereby British anglers felt it was only proper that the brown trout follow the course of conquest, which explains why it can now be found in places such as New Zealand, Chile, and South Africa, “to assure that anywhere a British colonist went, there would be good game for a fly rod.” As for rods and flies, Kurlansky geeks out, reciting names that are known to this day: Charles Orvis, for one, whose contributions to the tackle box are legion; and Clarence Birdseye, the frozen-food magnate whose automatically retracting reel when a fish struck was a dismal failure since “hauling out the fish is part of fishing.”
Stuffed full of trivia, data, lore, and anecdote—a pleasure for any fan of trout fishing.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-307-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
An overstuffed, enjoyable jaunt through the NFL’s recent past.
Four decades of football, as chronicled by a well-known sportswriter.
Longtime Sports Illustrated gridiron reporter King takes a maximalist approach, devoting one chapter to each year from 1984, when he started writing about the NFL, to 2023, the last season he covered the league full-time. This lengthy professional memoir features anecdotes and commentary, an argument-starting list of names for his “Mount Rushmore of Pro Football,” a crossword puzzle, and informative tidbits on tactics and playcalling, as well as profiles of singular players and warranted criticism of league bosses’ handling of player health and sports gambling. King skillfully charts the NFL’s inexorable growth. When he started, snail-mail newsletters were must-reads. In today’s media landscape, streaming networks have spent $4.3 billion to broadcast 58 games. As the author illustrates, Paul Tagliabue, a relatively unheralded league commissioner, engineered the year-round fan experience, with “tentpole events like a draft with more fanfare, free agency, and a new TV channel.” Polls showed that baseball and football were equally popular in the ’80s, but, by 2024, football had four times as many fans. Yet King’s kitchen-sink approach results in some bloat. Nobody yearns for a minute-by-minute rehash of the Cowboys’ 1991 draft or a rundown of the “quotes of 2002.” But amid the overabundance, there’s ample charm. In his best chapters, King catches up with guys he wrote about years ago. An 80-something Hall of Fame coach sketches Xs and Os on a notepad. A retired player known for his creative trash-talking shares tricks of the trade. In a powerful chapter, King visits a lab and looks at the damaged brain of a player he voted for in Hall of Fame balloting. This dovetails with King’s number-crunching on per-game hits sustained by players, important analysis as the league considers expanding its schedule.
An overstuffed, enjoyable jaunt through the NFL’s recent past.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781324123637
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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