Rating: 
Summary: Duncan writes with heart.
Review: My Story as Told by Water covers a varied terrain ranging from environmental activism to the virtues of fly-fishing without a hired guide. The book is really a collection of essays (many published in other books and periodicals) about rivers in the Northwestern United States. Duncan shares much of his early life growing up in neighborhoods just beyond the growing tentacles of Portland, Oregon. He writes openly about this family, including his bitter confrontation over the war in Vietnam with his dad, and the loss of his brother. Given such a backdrop, it's easy to understand how Duncan turned to the solitude of fishing local streams to deal with the pain of his youth. Later in the book, Duncan finds his stride writing about the not-so-bright outlook facing wild salmon along the Columbia and Snake Rivers. You can almost feel the tears welling up in his eyes as he describes their near exit from his world. He sums up the disaster of the salmon run on the Snake River this way: "The babble of 'salmon management' rhetoric has taken a river of prayful human yearning, diverted it into a thousand word-filled ditches, and run it over alkali. When migratory creatures are prevented from migrating, they are no longer migratory creatures: they're kidnap victims. The name of the living vessel in which wild salmon evolved and still thrive is not 'fish bypass system,' 'smolt-deflecting diversionary strobe light,' or 'barge.' It is River." Duncan opens his heart to the connections he has to rivers and wild fish. But more importantly, he gives us inspiration for making our own connections to those wild places.
Rating:
Summary: He's Done it Again
Review: Once again, David James Duncan captures most eloquently the inherent spirituality of nature. This collection of essays, speeches, and 1 song has moved me just as much as "The River Why", perhaps even more so, as this book is set in beautiful, raw, besieged reality. I dare you to read this book and not be inspired to make your corner of the world a little better, and a little more hospitable to every living thing. Duncan writes that he "became a nonfiction writer--after no apprenticeship whatever--at the age of 40. I did so not out of a sense of calling, but out of a sense of betrayal, out of rage over natural systems violated, out of grief for a loved world raped, and out of a craving for justice." This is the passion that forms this book, a book created in love for the rivers his writing sings for, and anger for the desecration of those same rivers. BUY THIS BOOK!
Rating:
Summary: The River Why is now my second favorite book.
Review: Rivers flow through this man and onto the page like it was their natural course. Standing in current and reading this book are two of the most important things you can do for yourself.
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