NEVER SNIFF A GIFT FISH

Again, as in his previous two collections, McManus offers columns (31 of them) from Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and other fishing/hunting journals--with low-key, high-quality humor on ample display through his agreeable mixture of reminiscences, parodies, gags, and whimsies. As before, many of the most engaging, least effortful moments come from glimpses of the McManus childhood: his first experiment with gunpowder, ""in which my eyebrows were sacrificed to the cause of science""; receiving a Christmas hatchet--but being told ""Now don't chop anything."" Autobiographical snippets from later years include both self-deprecating, just-a-little-exaggerated tales (agony on horseback, trying to make exciting journalism out of the tedium of elk-hunting) and more fanciful items--like McManus' encounter with a burglar who's unimpressed by the author's antique (i.e., rusty) gun collection. There are less personal stand-outs too: the outdoorsman's pride in disfigurement (""I have heard some scar stories approximately the length of Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, but such brevity is rare""); the limited appeal of wild foods. And when McManus does an outdoors/literary overlap, the results are almost always choice--whether discussing the philosophy-of-fish with Sartre and Camus or parodying Hemingway (a hilarious piece that suffers from overkill). True, there are filler entries here too, worth barely a smile: lists of mock-definitions, office exercises for outdoorsmen, the very limp title essay (about an outdoorsman determined to come up with an immortal new proverb). But, complete with appearances by such McManus regulars as Rancid Crabtree and Letch Sweeney, this is humor-column-writing of a remarkably consistent, likable, easy-going sort--and amusing even for those who'd never dream of lifting rod or rifle.