From Kirkus Reviews
paper 0-8214-1219-1 Fishing, particularly fly fishing, writes Browning, ``seems to hold a disproportionate place'' in North American letters In this thoughtful, penetrating, but dissertation-like look at the literature of fly-fishing, the author notes that fishermen who write can be likened to our ancient ancestors, ``who blazoned portrayals of the hunt on the walls of . . . caves.'' Browning asserts that ``the distinctiveness'' of American fishing writing flows from the Transcendentalists, in particular from a few paragraphs by Thoreau in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers wherein he views an old man fishing from a riverbank as performing ``a sort of solemn sacrament.'' Thoreau and others established another early hallmark of American fishing writing, he suggests, by wistfully writing of a Golden Age in America ``to be preferred over the present age of industry.'' But it is in scrutinizing Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and his story ``Big Two-Hearted River'' that Browning finds the most profound portrayals of fishing as an ``activity where life and death meet and stare at each other.'' Unfortunately, this is also where the author's dissertation style is most in evidence as he overreaches to investigate the ``story's doubleness,'' as suggested by its title. Interspersed with these scholarly chapters are interludes about Brownings own fishing experiences. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
