Customer Reviews

Fly Fishing

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I am an interior designer, a painter and art historian, also a writer of memoir and literary fiction, so you can imagine my distress when someone gifted me with a book about, of all things, fly fishing.
No subject could be further from my interests. Why me, I asked? Read it, he said.
A sunny day down by the river seemed an appropriate moment to begin. Six hours of riveted attention carried me through almost to the end. And so, I, too, say, read this book. You will be transported into a world of sport, but one which requires endlessly fascinating manipulation and relentless diligence. Years of exploring the shifts in nature's underwater mysteries, the currents in streams and vast waters.

No mere how-to or informational projection, Tirana settles into a spirituality with which he imbues fly fishing, a God-like communing with nature that is at once intimate with one's own soul yet conjoined with all human emotion. Deftly, he reveals our need to reach beyond ourselves to grasp the worldly bindings between man and his world, and how precious, indeed, are these resources. Tirana unravels these ties as he stands alone in watery spaces. Often, he invites in his children and his wife, and here we smile at familial adventures.
Upon closing down the last page, you will long for a stream, a pair of high boots and a fishing pole over your shoulder. Unraveling the details of this glorious and little-known sport, its history and its various technical aspects, Tirana holds us fast with evocative, lyrical writing, contemporary in its relevance but as fine as any nineteenth-century poetry.

The trick in this kind of book is to be both expert and entertaining, and Tirana pulls it off. He uncovers the secrets of this arcane sport as craftily as Hercule Poirot in pursuit of the villain, and provides an engaging personal story along the way -- witness the part where he decides to introduce his bride-to-be to the joys of hip boots in freezing streams. Never having cast a line in my life, I found it intriguing, front to back.

Turhan Tirana throws together a few loosely organized essays, with no common thread tying them together, one perhaps a little duller than the next, and produces a rather unremarkable read. Part memoir, part travelogue, with a little history thrown in, Tirana writes of fly fishing without the self deprecating humor of John Geirach or beautiful prose of Bill Barich. He somehow manages to make moments which lend themselves perfectly to writing-like courting his wife and being held at gunpoint-and make them drab and boring. It is a quick read, a little snobbish, as one reviewer has stated and certainly not the worst book ever, but really just another fly fisherman who feels compelled to tell the world the joy we receive from our sport, and fails to convey its beautiful aura.

Once again a rich somewhat snobbish writer thinks he has "captured" the essence of the sport. I was blessed to grow up in a rural upstate New York community near the birthplace of Art Flick, author of A Streamside Guide. My Dad and I fly fished as a means to unwind after a hard days work or to pass a Sunday afternoon. Unlike the author of this book, we didn't "fish abroad" and we tried not to be overly impressed with ourselves.

Once again a rich somewhat snobbish writer thinks he has "captured" the essence of the sport. I was blessed to grow up in a rural upstate New York community near the birthplace of Art Flick, author of A Streamside Guide. My Dad and I fly fished as a means to unwind after a hard days work or to pass a Sunday afternoon. Unlike the author of this book, we didn't "fish abroad" and we tried not to be overly impressed with ourselves.

Once again a rich somewhat snobbish writer thinks he has "captured" the essence of the sport. I was blessed to grow up in a rural upstate New York community near the birthplace of Art Flick, author of A Streamside Guide. My Dad and I fly fished as a means to unwind after a hard days work or to pass a Sunday afternoon. Unlike the author of this book, we didn't "fish abroad" and we tried not to be overly impressed with ourselves.