Schullery (Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness, 1997, etc.), an inveterate ferreter of fly- fishing’s deep past, serves up more arcana and opinions for the sport’s devout. What allows Schullery to rise a cut above most fishing writers, aside from the fact that he writes with grace and brevity, is his deflationary tactic. Not only is he interested in discovering what he can about the origins of piscatorial verities, but he also delights in disemboweling the folderol passed off as eternal truth by the sport’s self-appointed guardians. This can range from the question of who qualifies as a trout bum to whether or not it was Dame Juliana Berners who wrote the 15th-century “Treatise on Fishing with an Angle.” It can mean learning who might have been the first to wet a horse-hair line in the Letort Spring Run, or who invented the dry fly and where it was first fished, or why building a great bamboo fly rod is a craft and building a great violin is an art. When it comes time for Schullery to venture a few opinions of his own, he wears his erudition lightly. He knows well the “charms of studying the evolution of a great fly pattern,” invests the changing of the body material on a Hendrickson dry with Darwinian import, and explains why a band of scarlet silk turns a humble coachman into royalty. And he is one of the few fishing writers who know enough to let a place—the Battenkill, for instance—keep its mystery, who know that no degree of dissection will reveal its soul. In a literature so abounding in snobs and reverse snobs, Schullery comes like a blast of fresh air, an iconoclast with an inclusive spirit that Whitman would have admired.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84246-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Duane (Lighting Out, 1994) is a surf hound, doubtless, but he explores a whole lot more than great green rooms of tubular water in this testament to an obsession. The narrative starts with Duane drowning, nearly, pounded by the waters of the Point, his chosen venue, a slice of the Pacific Ocean off Monterey Bay. Neither new to surfing nor a veteran, Duane wanted to spend an intimate year with the waves, to feel their soothing, healing effects and astounding violence, to live the surfer's life. But sliding down the water's face is only part of the process; he wanted the whole zeitgeist, and he delivers it with easy precision. The technicalities are handled with aplomb: how to craft a board, from the old 18-foot Hawaiian prototypes to today's 7-foot shredding marvels; how to interpret the color of the water, the vectors of wind and swell. He conveys a physicist's appreciation of wave forms—frequencies and amplitudes and periods, energy as measured by joules per second. He is an appreciative audience for the natural world during walks to the beach, seeing and describing mustard and hemlock, cougar and bird. On the water, he explains traffic rules and pecking orders (more than once falling foul of the strictures); up and running he dips a ``finger in the water just to believe it's happening, and feel the light joy of effortless, combustion-free speed''; surrounded by a pipe of water, he ``physically penetrates the heart of the ocean's energy,'' then gets slammed onto the deck once again. Duane willingly takes his knocks. Utterly intriguing are the psycho-probings he assays with his surfing friends into the fanaticism of surfers, how it reflects their past, brackets their love lives, defines their expectations. Duane wrestles poetry from the surf's chaos—wild and vital, supple and elegant. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-86547-494-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
The life of former Negro League player and manager O'Neil, whose folksy gentility was so winning in Ken Burns's documentary Baseball. Born John Jordan O'Neil in Carrabelle, Fla., in 1911, O'Neil started playing semi-pro ball at the age of 12. He signed with the Tampa Black Smokers in 1934, then played with the Miami Giants before being picked up by a farm team of the famed Kansas City Monarchs. There were other stops on the way to the big time, including a barnstorming stint with the Zulu Cannibal Giants, a team that played wearing grass skirts. O'Neil takes long, affectionate looks at old friends and teammates, including the legendary Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Pap Bell, Buck Leonard, Newt Allen, and ``the greatest player'' he ever saw, Oscar Charleston, who played for the Indianapolis ABCs in the 1920s. His ``favorite'' year—and its recounting is the highlight of the book- -was 1942, when he and his Monarch teammates beat Gibson and Leonard's Homestead Grays in the Negro World Series. His reminiscences and anecdotes are generally fresh and engaging, if sometimes a bit soft-pedaled: ``I never faced any real racism traveling around the country . . . Oh, you'd hear some kid make some kind of crack, but you didn't let that bother you none.'' He does, however, acknowledge Jackie Robinson's accomplishment—and his consequent struggles—in breaking the color barrier. And as a longstanding force on the Hall of Fame selection committee, he has ffought for the admission of former Negro Leaguers. O'Neil doesn't place himself on his all-time Negro League team—he was only ``very good''—but hopes to make it to the Hall of Fame someday, ``as a manager or for other contributions.'' Sweetly self-effacing, O'Neil's grace and charm play almost as well here as they do for the camera. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80305-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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