Description:
Sailing on prose as liquid as the streams and lakes he fishes, Schullery, one of angling's most prolific and elegant chroniclers, casts some fine lines that gently lure us into his lovely meditations on the development of fly-fishing and its literature. "Though we pride ourselves on our pragmatism," he observes in "The Fisherman's Chaucer," a lovely tribute to Juliana Berners, the medieval mother of all fishing scribes, "at times most of us harbor a very nearly occult obsession with some imagined higher awareness, a state of knowing that will give us the right lure, the right bait, the right rod, the right sequence of profanity--whatever it is that we're plainly not doing now that will be revealed to us, and we will become that most envied and lionized of fishermen--The Expert." Throughout Coachman's 14 individual reflections, Schullery continually roots around that occult obsession as he traces the evolution of fly-fishing from English streams to New England pools and the rushing waters of the American West. He is haunted by imaginings of the perfect dry fly, the genesis of a species of angler he calls trout bum, and the wisdom he can glean from tools of the trade left behind by fishermen past. Like all devoted anglers, he's a wonderfully inclusive storyteller. You don't have to know the origins of a Royal Coachman to be hooked; Schullery's wit and grace are enough to reel in the appreciative reader in everyone. --Jeff Silverman
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