Customer Reviews

HEALING THE FISHER KING: A Fly Fisher's Quest

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As a writer and dreamwork psychologist myself I find Dr. Scott Sparrow's book an inspiration to read.

I recommend this book highly as a journey especially for men, and for women who appreciate their men. What this book has, which is perhaps lacking in many popular spiritual books, is showing the author as a human being living his life journey as all of us can live ours.

Scott Sparrow will take you through your own childhood relationship with a parent and how that affects you in adult life, not by giving you psychology, but by your participating in certain life episodes important to him personally and spiritually.

The book is an excellent read in the Americana of being in nature in only the way Americans do it. Scott admits he grew up as a competitor and still is one in his chosen sport of serious fly fishing in South Texas. He is strong in his relationships with men. Scott is a man's man but not macho. He is not interested in seducing women but in relating to them. He is not interested in boasting to his fellow males about his accomplishments, yet he is interested in doing extremely well at what he does.

There is another side to Scott Sparrow. He has been since childhood a natural mystic because of his dreams. Dreams have always signaled new developments in his life for better and for worse. Scott is no saint, as he is sure to reveal to us. Yet he redeems himself through remorse and action. He not only achieves impressively in the world and in the sport of fly fishing, he also works on himself.

This is a male who works on himself, girls, the ideal man! And men, watch out! You need to work on yourselves also and take how your behavior affects others with genuine conscience. But Scott is at times even deeper because his dreams have transpersonal elements of white light experiences and revelations. In a nature society of the past he would be known as both a warrior and spirit shaman.

Read this book for yourself so that you may experience what it is like to quest on a spiritual journey, yet not give up your ordinary life you were born to. Scott does not retreat into monasteries and Himalayan caves. He goes sports fishing, and he takes his dad and son, and his best male friend with him, and also his pilot brother. And he brings his wife also because she has adapted to the fly fishing way of life.

Recommended for many levels of reading: Father-son relating, Right relationship relating with the opposite sex, inner-outer relating with oneself, spiritual awakening and individual God-relating through dreams, practice of devotion and visions.

Scott does not hide his shadow, his extreme side that sometimes hurts himself and others. Scott grows up into a real adult and tells us some of those episodes. Yet, while Scott is personally revealing he is never narcissistic completely. His natural self-centeredness is balanced with devotion to others close to him and by his extraordinary dreams which he takes seriously, learning from them that he is not in charge.

Scott is a fine, natural writer, finding just the right words to convey emotion and experience together, crisp in language. No extra words there in his prose. Probably he learned from fly fishing, which is his great metaphor for living life spiritually. Apparently only the right fly will do. Good writers feel the same way. Only the right words will do to convey the right feeling and essence of an experience.

Read Scott Sparrow and enjoy a few hours out of your own life into his. You will appreciate the contrast. I for one got to live again my boyhood. I use him and his father as the father I might have liked to have, had I not my own father to deal with.

I felt right at home on the Bayou, so to speak. Oh, Scott gets into trouble. You cannot believe his unconsciousness in not getting himself treated right away after a terrible wounding by a stingray. But that is Scott! He never presents himself as perfect, and neither am I. And neither are you, reader. So enjoy his book, as I am.

Recommended for adults who travel inwardly, for high school and university classrooms in contemporary American literature that reflect a genuine experience of connecting the past and present in the America of today.

For students also to do good book reviews and essays, and to feel in tune with their own appreciation of life.

A real book, unlike so many books that stay in the mind, or let you live through others and not yourself.