National Outdoor Book Award Winner for Outdoor Literature
From the award-winning, bestselling author of Cod--the irresistible
story of the science, history, art, and culture of the least efficient
way to catch a fish.
Fly fishing, historian Mark Kurlansky has found, is a battle of wits,
fly fisher vs. fish--and the fly fisher does not always (or often) win.
The targets--salmon, trout, and char; and for some, bass, tarpon, tuna,
bonefish, and even marlin--are highly intelligent, wily, strong, and
athletic animals. The allure, Kurlansky learns, is that fly fishing
makes catching a fish as difficult as possible. There is an art, too, in
the crafting of flies. Beautiful and intricate, some are made with more
than two dozen pieces of feather and fur from a wide range of animals.
The cast as well is a matter of grace and rhythm, with different casts
and rods yielding varying results.
Kurlansky is known for his deep dives into the history of specific
subjects, from cod to oysters to salt. But he spent his boyhood days on
the shore of a shallow pond. Here, where tiny fish weaved under a rocky
waterfall, he first tied string to a branch, dangled a worm into the
water, and unleashed his passion for fishing. Since then, a lifelong
love of the sport has led him around the world to many countries,
coasts, and rivers--from the wilds of Alaska to Basque country, from the
Catskills in New York to Oregon's Columbia River, from Ireland and
Norway to Russia and Japan. And, in true Kurlansky fashion, he absorbed
every fact, detail, and anecdote along the way.
The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing marries Kurlansky's signature
wide-ranging reach with a subject that has captivated him for a
lifetime--combining history, craft, and personal memoir to show readers,
devotees of the sport or not, the necessity of experiencing nature's
balm first-hand.
