Amazon.com Review
When the taciturn hero of Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River" returns from the Great War, he heads straight to the northern Michigan woods to begin the process of healing. Camping along the river and fishing for trout, Nick Adams slowly retrieves the elements of a life interrupted, allowing familiar sensations to wash over him:
He stepped into the stream. It was a shock. His trousers clung tightly to his legs. His shoes felt the gravel.... There was a tug on the line. It was his first strike. Holding the now living rod across the current, he brought in the line with his left hand. The rod bent in jerks, the trout pumping against the current.
Later, breaking his leader on a large fish, he reels in, feeling "a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down." More than one critic has called "Big Two-Hearted River" the author's
greatest short story. Certainly it's a model of the form, written in the uncluttered prose that Hemingway made his trademark. That he struck such a deep, cathartic chord with what seems on the face of it like a simple fish tale is no accident: Hemingway would return to his love of angling time and again over the course of his career.
Hemingway on Fishing collects the bulk of the author's angling-related writings, including other Nick Adams stories and excerpts from several novels--most notably, the memorable wine-soaked pilgrimage to Spain's Irati River in The Sun Also Rises. However, the lesser-known newspaper and magazine articles may elicit even more interest among readers. A piece that the 21-year-old Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Star Weekly in August 1920 reveals his rather precocious confidence. "At present the best rainbow trout fishing in the world is in the rapids of the Canadian Soo," he announces in the first paragraph, and then proceeds to scotch any hopes of an easy catch:
It is a wild and nerve-frazzling sport and the odds are in favor of the big trout who tear off thirty or forty yards of line at a rush and then will sulk at the base of a rock and refuse to be stirred into action by the pumping of a stout fly rod aided by a fluent monologue of Ojibwayian profanity.
By 1933, Hemingway was writing about his true angling passion--deep-sea big-game fishing--for the likes of Esquire and other large-circulation glossies. In "Marlin of the Morro: A Cuban Letter," he notes that when the northeast trade winds blow, the "marlin come to the top and cruise the wind." To catch a fish, the saying goes, you must think like one--and Papa's perceptive descriptions of piscine behavior show why he was considered one of the premiere anglers of his day. It's true that Hemingway indulged his passions in life and on the page, and that sometimes the former got him into trouble. As for the latter, those of us who enjoy a good fish story are the luckier for it. --Langdon Cook
From Publishers Weekly
The Lyons Press releases three books this November about man's primal passion for fishing and hunting. For the first book, Hemingway on Fishing, edited and introduced by Nick Lyons and with a foreword by Hemingway's son Jack, the publisher will undertake a 100,000-copy print run ($29.95 288p ISBN 1-58574-144-2). Hemingway's love for fishing is legendary, and both his fiction and journalism are filled with tales about his favorite sport. From his famous story "Big Two-Hearted River" to selections from The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway's passion comes across, just as he did, as larger than life. A photo of Ernest Hemingway with a huge catch adorns the cover of The Greatest Fishing Stories Ever Told, a collection of 28 essays by contributors such as Hemingway, Zane Grey and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, edited and introduced by Lamar Underwood (On Dangerous Ground) ($24.95 304p -140-X). Underwood also presents the similar formatted The Greatest Hunting Stories Ever Told, featuring essays by such avid sportsmen as William Faulkner, Theodore Roosevelt and, yes, Ernest Hemingway ($24.95 288p ISBN-141-8).
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