Customer Reviews

Trout Flies & Flowers

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I purchased a copy of this book when I first noticed it being carried by the Orvis Company. I personally, being what i consider to be an intermediate flyfisherman, felt this book would not be of great service to me. However, i gave it to my son who was just beggining to learn how to fly fish, and he found it to be great help and a nice read. As too what a previous viewer said, I challenge you to find a book printed today that does not have mispellings or mispunctuations. I also would like to point out that you are obviously hostile, judging by your tirade, toward flyfishermen. I wonder if you even know how to use a fly. Lastly, I would like to say that this book was produced, in part I believe, with the Lyons Press. The Lyons Press, a publisher of note in the fishing genre, would not have affixed its name to this book had this book not been of good quality.

Being one of the people mentioned in the book, I must say that I enjoyed it immensly. The author and illustrator ent to great lengths to create a book that is beautiful to look at and is functional as well. Beggining fisherman will love it because it is easy to use. Expert fishermen will find that it is good for organizing their trips and their equipment in order to save space. The recipe in the back of the book is really delicious as well!

I've given this book to a dozen people I've taught to flyfish for trout. They have all enjoyed the book. I've used the book stream side all over New England, NY, and Pennsylvania. It's a great book.

As an intermediate flyfisher, and an even more avid follower of the progress of its recorded technique, I find this book a silly, maybe slippery step backwards in the stream of angling writing. It's cute, it's got some Bambi-like charm, but it's a disservice to a beginner to suggest this is a reliable or even a serviceable approach to fly selection (outside the early season and one region of the US). There are several books of near-to-same cost with much greater range, value and reliability. Correlating blooming with instream activity with fly selection is teaching a kind of non-thinking about a thinking person's sport, and a Disneyized version of stream awareness and even conservation. If these guys were doctors, they'd recommend bleeding as a treatment for measles (yea, I know leeches are still in use --but what would you think if your physician recommended leech treatment for the flu? --and charged you $200?). The "theory" here is not WRONG, but you might as well work it backwards (as any good theory will do) --and plant your flowers according to what acquatic insects are found in the local waters. That would work out, too. If flyfishing were not already dragging the weight of its own self-importance around, this "handbook" would do no harm. But this is pure indulgence in the putative purer connection of flyfishing with big N "Nature." Get over it, Piscator. Spend the $14 (never mind the EXTRA $10 for the slide-o-matic chart) money on virtually ANY other hatches book, including the Charley Meck books on eastern hatches. Or make your own notes. This is silly commercial angling "romance" disguised as technique.

This is the kind of overripe book that gives flyfishing its discreet class airs and dubious eco-superiority claims: making a fly selection is the heart of the matter; this not-news/nature gimmick is really "dumbing down" the game.

In addition it's a badly produced object in itself, rife with mis-spellings, bad usage and scientific error. I object to this as anything other than a sort of regressive, exploitive, "Bambi-ized" approach.