Fishing by Mail: The Outdoor Life of a Father and Son [Hardcover]

Vance Bourjaily (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1993

A father and son share humorous anecdotes and the joy of their sporting endeavors through a series of letters about hunting, fishing, and life close to the land.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Outdoorsy folk will get a kick out of this, and so will those who just enjoy something fun to read. Vance and Philip Bourjaily, father and son, write to each other, expending their ink on their latest adventures--or misadventures--at hunting, fishing, or just being outdoors. What with the era of faxes and low-cost long-distance phone calls having relegated the epistolary art to the ash heap of extinct communication techniques, you don't see many books composed of letters nowadays. But backward as letter writing may seem, the Bourjailys' examples give the wonderful sense of sitting down with a couple of folks, filling some glasses with some sort of quaff, and then spinning some tales, truthful or not. Through these letters, you get an inkling of how it is to fish for the fabled mahseer in India (or at least to try), to search for mushrooms in the woods, or to hunt ducks and quail in Iowa. Maybe there's no great literature to it, but just the glimmering this book imparts of how wonderful letter writing used to be and how father and son can share experiences without reaching out and touching someone is great enough. Jon Kartman

From Kirkus Reviews

A game bag stuffed to the limit by letters between a father and son swapping fishing and hunting stories. When veteran novelist Bourjaily (Old Soldier, 1990, etc.) and his son, Philip (a freelancer publishing in Field & Stream, Sports Afield, etc.), are approached to write a book that will ``provide insights into the character of the angler in today's society...what his act of fishing means to him,'' they start right in writing back and forth to each other, going straight for a slew of fishing stories and then swinging into the nature of hunting deer, turkey, partridge, snapping turtles, and more. Ever wonder what it's like to hunt alligators? Vance puts you with him in a battered aluminum john boat steered with a small outboard motor by his Cajun friend, the two hunters confidently armed with a battered .22 and half a broomstick with a hook. Vance can't stop thinking, though, that the boat is 15 feet long and many gators run 12 feet and 600 pounds. Meanwhile, Philip is passing the pheasant season in Iowa in a terrible slump: He's missed 13 roosters in a row, despite these birds being scorned by many duck hunters as being so big and slow that killing them is ``like shooting kites.'' When Philip tells his hunting partner that he has to go back to the truck for more bullets because ``I've only got five left, and I'm saving the last one for myself,'' his friend advises, ``Save two. You'll probably miss.'' Back in Louisiana, Vance writes that he's hiring marsh Cajuns for duck-season opening: ``We could have easily won the war in Vietnam,'' he says, ``if we'd sworn in a squad of them and told them that the Viet Cong were good to eat, but that they were out of season and there was a limit of two of them.'' Fine fare for those who like to swap stories over the campfire--or who just enjoy getting the real, unadorned McCoy. (First serial to Field & Stream) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Grove Press (June 1993)
• ISBN-10: 0802112633
• ISBN-13: 978-0802112637
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,907,863 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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