Amazon.com Review
When David James Duncan was growing up in suburban Portland, Oregon, he had no river to call his own, so he would routinely create one by flooding his mother's garden with a hose. He would then revel in his creation until he received the inevitable scolding. The poor kid couldn't help himself: "Running water ... felt as necessary to me as food, sleep, parents, and air," he explains. In time, he exchanged his nozzle for a fly rod and went in search of grander gardens, eventually developing an "interior coho compass" which he has traveled by ever since.
As any reader of The River Why knows, Duncan is a master of the art of writing about fishing--which is also to say life, since the two for him are indelibly linked. But these essays deal with far more than leaky waders and rising trout. Part memoir, part activist treatise, My Story As Told by Water is Duncan's love song to wild places and the creatures which inhabit them. The book's highlight is his powerfully convincing essay "A Prayer for the Salmon's Second Coming," in which he argues that saving salmon is crucial to both man and fish alike: "A 'modern Northwest' that cannot support salmon is unlikely to support 'modern Northwesterners' for long," he writes. In this elegant demand for the removal of four Snake River dams (out of 221 on the Snake/Columbia system), Duncan declares the wild salmon "a holiness, a divine gift," a role model rather than a resource: "Salmon are a light darting not just through water, but through the human mind and heart. Salmon help shield us from fear of death by showing us how to follow our course without fear, and how to give ourselves for the sake of things greater than ourselves."
He also ruminates on the true meanings of "place" and "home"; offers a fable on the 1872 Mining Act, "the most anachronistic and devastating piece of 'corporate welfare' in the world"; and details how Montanans rallied to prevent a giant mining company from extracting gold near the Blackfoot River, the setting of the Norman Maclean classic A River Runs Through It. All in all, My Story As Told by Water is a moving collection by an exquisite writer endowed with wit, compassion, and the rare ability to appeal to both emotion and reason in equal measures. --Shawn Carkonen
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
For a book that's cobbled together from essays that have appeared in such engagingly eclectic sources as the Patagonia clothing catalogue, Harper's, Gray's Sporting Journal and the New York Times, there's an engaging coherence to Duncan's 22 angry, heartbroken, yet hopeful and often quite comic nature essays. The author, whose 1983 debut novel, The River Why, became an enduring fly-fishing classic, holds the reader with the power of his unabashed passion for America's watersheds, particularly in the north and west. It's a lifelong appreciation that dates back to the days when, as a boy, he built his own wee rivers in the backyard. Sounding a clarion call to conservation activism, Duncan eloquently explains why clean, free-running water matters: just as we die without good water, so does the earth. Yet his unabashed polemic is nicely cushioned by rhapsody; he's the ranter as poet. "The War for Norman's River" (i.e., the Blackfoot River, central to Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It) is both a searing indictment of mining company predation and a celebration of citizens' power. In other chapters, he damns dams, lovingly eulogizes philosopher Henry Bugbee, acidly parodies the "anachronistic and devastating" 1872 Mining Act and, in a set of essays closing out the book, "Fishing the Inside Passage," makes the connection between the spirit of the land and the spirit of humankind. The sum of these many pieces is a vital whole.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
by David James Duncan
by David James Duncan
by David James Duncan
by Mary Oliver
by Rick Bass
