How Lyons (Fishing Widows, 1974, etc., and president of Lyons & Burford publishers) manages, year after year, to wrest fresh, hugely entertaining material from the world of fly-fishing is a mystery. But he does. Lyons likes to fish. He likes to fish long and hard, short and delicate. He likes to fish for all manner of quarry (though the brown trout is his downfall), and he will happily fish a spinning rod when the wicked, slender fly rod won't do. And when he's not streamside, he likes to fish in his head, read about fishing, paw through his fly boxes, dream of the honey holes. Lyons just slipped past the 60 mark, recently emerged from a hospital stay, and this collection of his articles and essays is a bit more reflective than his earlier books; the humor is still there, the wit sharp, but now he's taking a bead on why fishing has given him such pleasure, enthralled him so, made him, in a word, happy. In the long run, that joy may be ineffable, yet two aspects of his avocation continue to rise to the surface: Fishing makes him think, puzzle out a stretch of water, get intimate with the currents, eddies, and backwaters; and he deeply loves the context—not just the history and literature and paraphernalia, but even more the riverine environment, ``the things that led us here in the first place: simplicity, untrampled bogs and banks, sweet silences, and perfectly exquisite beauty.'' While Lyons would run screaming from the suggestion, there is more than just a touch of the graybeard's wisdom here; when he talks of Roderick Haig-Brown's books, their ``high-level of quiet instruction, inconspicuouly offered,'' the same could be applied to this book, teachings that shape the soul of the fisherman. For Lyons, fishing is a matter of the heart, and to fishing he has blissfully lost his.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87113-628-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.
A disjointed debut memoir about how competitive swimming shaped the personal and artistic sensibilities of a respected illustrator.
Through a series of vignettes, paintings and photographs that often have no sequential relationship to each other, Shapton (The Native Trees of Canada, 2010, etc.) depicts her intense relationship to all aspects of swimming: pools, water, races and even bathing suits. The author trained competitively throughout her adolescence, yet however much she loved racing, “the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn’t motivate me.” In 1988 and again in 1992, she qualified for the Olympic trials but never went further. Soon afterward, Shapton gave up competition, but she never quite ended her relationship to swimming. Almost 20 years later, she writes, “I dream about swimming at least three nights a week.” Her recollections are equally saturated with stories that somehow involve the act of swimming. When she speaks of her family, it is less in terms of who they are as individuals and more in context of how they were involved in her life as a competitive swimmer. When she describes her adult life—which she often reveals in disconnected fragments—it is in ways that sometimes seem totally random. If she remembers the day before her wedding, for example, it is because she couldn't find a bathing suit to wear in her hotel pool. Her watery obsession also defines her view of her chosen profession, art. At one point, Shapton recalls a documentary about Olympian Michael Phelps and draws the parallel that art, like great athleticism, is as “serene in aspect” as it is “incomprehensible.”
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.Pub Date: July 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15817-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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