Posts tagged: book review

Underground Review: Brook Trout Forest by Kathy Scott

May 31, 2011, by Tom Chandler 3 comments

Kathy Scott’s Brook Trout Forest is a simple, journal-style essay book covering a year in the life of the author, and Scott focuses on the themes of teaching, bamboo fly rod building fly fishing and nature.

Brook Trout Forest cover Scott writes movingly of the Maine woods and through her words, you can almost feel the deep sporting history of the place — the kind of world lost to so many of us in our “mobile” society.

Her essays are shorn of the self-affected posturing cluttering so much of today’s fly fishing literature, and those who believe fly fishing adventure exists only when a former soviet republic is involved will probably want to look elsewhere.

Instead, Scott simply pens a sweet, simple straightforward account of her year in fishing and bamboo rod making. There is little conflict or drama, a fact which is likely the book’s greatest strength and perhaps its biggest weakness.

Scott’s at her best when she weaves the moments of her life into her sweetly rendered observations of nature, yet at times, it can grow a little too sweet. Brook Trout Forest would be the better for a little edge or conflict — something to wake up the essay (and the reader). You can’t truly appreciate the good without at least a little of the bad, and Brook Trout Forest too often lacks even a little bad.

As a result, in one or two moments it felt a little one-dimensional, and those who prefer a hard-bitten look at the outdoors will find this a little too soft.

Outside of those moments, Brook Trout Forest is a wonderful book and a smooth read, and if the author ends up road tripping to Michigan and Labrador without ever getting falling down drunk or feeling the need to “create” adventure, then I’m fine with that, and I suspect a lot of other readers would be too. Her infatuation with bamboo fly rods added a nice dimension to the read, especially when she and her rod building partner crafted the two rods they were taking on their Brookie trip to Labrador.

For those who like to try before they buy, here’s an excerpt:

The roar of the Otter’s engine prevented much conversation, but the important things were obvious. Fred, behind me, pointed out a black bear not that far below. David pointed to caribou trails worn though the moss on an esker. The ceiling held at 600 feet, cloudy as promised, but we flew gracefully below it. The land rose up nearer the plane as we shouldered the only real mountain between us and the Woods River system. The white, blue and green flag of Labrador was inspired by all of this, a sprig of black spruce, the wealth of lakes and rivers, the simplicity of the wild landscape.

Endless dark spruce gave way to a sparser look, nudging the tree line. Caribou moss, really a lichen, carpeted openings in a light yellowish green, alders and willow shrubs a medium, brushy green. Granite from the roots of time emerged here and there, still fresh, and the patterns of muskeg and water decorated broad expanses. Lakes, lakes, everywhere, and beautiful rivers, some like mirrors, some roaring and exciting. Bogs with pools, then arching rock whalebacks. Braided caribou trails etched onto the landscape. I leaned on the daypack on my lap and rested my forehead against the window, my chin on my hand. For 150 miles, it was impossible to look away.

Brook Trout Forest will probably never receive the readership it deserves, though I liked it very much and suspect some of the Undergrounders will too. Scott writes simply and richly of a life well lived, and a world that — for many — is worth a closer look.

See you at the bookshelf, Tom Chandler

Where to Buy Brook Trout Forest:

Alder Creek Publishing

The Angler’s Bookcase

Other Reviews of Brook Trout Forest:

From Three Rivers Lodge

The Fishing History Blog

Maine Outdoor Journal

An Underground Book Review: An Entirely Synthetic Fish

December 13, 2010, by Tom Chandler 17 comments

The last century has seen the rapid spread of the rainbow trout across the USA, and Anders Halverson’s award-winning book An Entirely Synthetic Fish) does an excellent job of chronicling the rainbow trout’s manmade diaspora – along with the negative effects on native fish populations.

An Entirely Synthetic Fish is a worthwhile read

Halverson is a thorough researcher and a fine storyteller, and his engaging book never lags or lapses into biologist “geekspeak.”

Instead, it’s an engrossing read – one that’s hard to put down, and just as hard to forget.

Halverson dives into the history of the rainbow trout starting with the expedition up the still-wild (and dangerous) McCloud River to establish a hatchery.

With sportsmen cheering every step of the way, Halverson highlights the rainbow’s rapid spread across the USA (and the planet), and the displacement (and wholesale extinction) of the native species who get in the way.

Fortunately, he manages to do this without casting the fisheries managers behind the rainbow diaspora as “bad guys.”

It was a “conquer the wilderness” era, and it wasn’t until the watershed event on the Green River – where biologists used tons of Rotenone to poison out every last native species so millions of rainbows could be stocked – that fisheries people finally blinked.

Halverson’s account of the Green River project was gripping, and in fact, read a lot like a novel (I half-expected Bond to show up).

Later, Halverson examined Montana’s “no stocking” legacy, the impact of whirling disease on several key fisheries, and the ill-fated decision of Colorado’s hatchery program to knowingly stock whirling-infected rainbow trout in almost all the state’s waters.

Halverson’s examination of the Sierra lakes hit closer to home, where rainbow trout introductions into formerly fishless alpine lakes played havoc with amphibian populations.

As someone who lives and fishes in the mountains of California, I’ve heard a great deal of grumbling from “sportsmen” about the high country fish removal policies, especially since “our” trout are being removed to protect frogs, which most people don’t fish for.

Clearly, the “sportsmen first, natives second” attitudes of the past century still loom large in many of today’s outdoorsmen (witness the cutthroat recovery and wolf reintroduction issues of the Northern Rockies), and while it’s tempting to dismiss Halverson’s book as documenting a bygone era, that’s more self-delusion than reality.

Overall, An Entirely Synthetic Fish is an engrossing book that sometimes reads like a novel (though its 30 page bibliography will dissuade you from that thought).

It deservedly won a National Outdoor Book Award, and is well worth any fly fishermen’s time.

A Pair of Category-Defying Underground Book Reviews: Lift, and Fat Of The Land

November 9, 2010, by Tom Chandler 5 comments

I sometimes receive review copies of books that don’t fall directly within the fly fishing category (or any category for that matter), yet they’re simply too good to ignore.

Lift and Fat of the Land are two such books, and as a fan of good writing, I can’t relegate either to the “Unreviewed” pile simply because they don’t fall into the fly fishing category.

Who knew good writing existed outside of fly fishing?

Lift: A Memoir

Lift is a powerful book about a woman’s lifelong obsession with falcons, and focuses on the year spent “training” a particularly difficult peregrine.

(click cover to buy Lift)

Like most good books, it covers far more ground than its one-sentence summary suggests, and in fact, it’s really a memoir, though if truly pressed, I’d suggest it was the chronicle of a woman and a falcon teaching each other to trust again.

Rebecca O’Connor populates Lift with jaw-dropping honesty, and the book prompted me to write this review at Goodreads.com:

This is a wonderful book – jammed with jaw-dropping honesty, lyrical beauty, and enough information about falconry to intrigue.

Ms. O’Connor writes of the journey she takes while training a peregrine falcon, relating significant moments back to her not-always-easy life. A history of abuse haunts her, and yet – as she supposedly “trains” her falcon – it’s clear the learning is a two-way street.

Ms. O’Connor trains the falcon how to hunt, yet the two are really training each other to trust.

Of the two, the latter is far more important, and by the end of the book, I was cheering for the pair.

O’Connor describes hunting with her falcon in direct – even savage – terms, yet doesn’t gloss over the difficulties she faced while training her peregrine.

O’Connor even managed to write a brilliant article about the difficulties she faced getting Lift published and the lackluster sales of the book (Lift doesn’t neatly fit into an established category, which makes sales difficult).

In online venues, Lift has alternately been described as a falconry book, a memoir, a “chick book” and a few others.

I think it’s just plain brilliant, and worth buying if you have any interest at all in falconry – and frank, honest writing.

(You can buy Lift at one of the online stores listed here. Her blog is here.)

Fat Of The Land

Another book that defies easy categorization, Fat Of The Land is a funny and informative journal of a writer’s attempts to gather and eat wild food in the Pacific Northwest.

(Click cover to buy Fat Of The Land)

Written from a sportsman’s perspective (he wholly avoids preaching about local foods), writer Langdon Cook adds a healthy dose of humor to each food gathering expedition, and like Lift, I read Fat Of The Land twice.

Cook finds himself foraging the ocean for clams, shrimp, salmon and ling cod, combs recently burned forests for morels, and harvests dandelions from the median strip of a busy street.

Along the way, Cook describes his expeditions – and the characters who populate them – with humor and insight.

Though he includes recipes at the end of each chapter, this is not a cook book or primer on local/organic foods.

Instead, it’s a humorous journal of expeditions into the wild, told by a master storyteller.

You can compare Fat Of The Land prices here, or visit Langdon Cook’s blog here.

An Uncrowded Place by Bob Butz: An Underground Book Review

March 17, 2009, by Tom Chandler No comments yet

An Uncrowded Place, by Bob Butz

Writing outdoor essays isn’t exactly a lonely industry; place the words devoted to the outdoors end to end, and you could find yourself in possession of a bridge long enough to reach another planet.

An Uncrowded Place by Bob Butz

In a few cases, those words shine, including most found in An Uncrowded Place – a collection of sporting essays by freelance writer Bob Butz.

While a few of his essays feel uneven, Butz’s better efforts shine brightly (his essay on home remodeling falls flat while the next – a piece about snagging salmon – is bright and thoughtful).

Throughout the book, Butz’s essays avoid posturing and inauthentic cliche. Instead, they focus largely on the day-to-day sporting activities of someone trying to live an outdoor life, usually from a philosophical perspective.

In that one sense, they’re reminiscent of Gierach’s work (at least Gierach’s around-home stuff), though Butz lacks Gierach’s fly fishing focus and ironic sensibility. Instead, Butz’s essays approach the outdoor life from a more general perspective, mixing fishing, hunting, camping and other topics in equal quantity.

His essays are witty and good fun, and I found the book intriguing enough to read twice. In fact, through both readings, my primary criticism remained the same: length.

The book is mostly composed of essays originally written for an online magazine, and while the quality of the work is apparent, I found myself stumbling over the brevity. Several of the author’s best essays spanned only 2.25 pages; I’d get warmed up on a topic, settle in for the (largely enjoyable) ride, and then run headlong into the end of the chapter.

Butz is at his best while looking critically at the sporting life and sportsmen, and his pieces on becoming a father in his 30s are authentic and thoughtful. In fact, Butz seems incapable of writing a dishonest sentence, and it’s that honesty that sustains his book.

He shines brightest when he’s being reflective; his playful pieces don’t quite reach the same heights. For example, when you’re writing about something as universal as mosquitoes, you’d better offer fresh insight, and Butz’s essay on mosquitoes doesn’t quite reach that level.

Still, his essay about night fishing for salmon (Dream Fish, Night Fish) paints a vivid picture:

I most like fishing for salmon at the river’s mouth, where you stand in water up to your armpits. There, under the wide eyes of the moon, in the near dark, I tie my knots by feel, by memory.

With any fish but salmon, I prefer delicate tackle, tiny hand-tied flies, and long rods as sensitive as nerve endings. But on these nights, I come wanting a good fight and, admittedly, meat that – out here in the dark – seems more fairly won.

His essay about new snow (Tracks) similarly impresses:

I’m a lover of stories so, naturally, I’m a lover of tracks.

It’s one reason I enjoy winter so much. The woods after a freshly fallen snow, every time, feel to me clean and quiet and made new again, what with so many tracks, so many new trails – make that tales – to follow.

I have a red fox living in the woods behind the house. Though I’ve never seen him, I know he’s made it another year. Every winter, after every new dusting of snow, I find his tracks in all the same places. He likes the rock pile behind the barn – no doubt for the mice he finds there.

I could wish for a book filled with longer essays, but An Uncrowded Place is a thoughtful, first-class read for any fly fishermen willing to look beyond the confines of the long rod for inspiration.

Butz writes knowingly of not just the outdoors but also the frustration of living in the outdoors and still finding himself without enough time to fully enjoy it.

That, at least, is something most of understand, and if it’s one thing Butz’s essays show us, it’s that he understands too.

An Uncrowded Place: The delights and dilemmas of life Up North and a young man’s search for home
by Bob Butz
150 pgs; Huron River Press

A Rare Underground Poetry Review: Killing Trout & Other Love Poems

August 28, 2008, by Tom Chandler 12 comments

Poetry isn’t a staple here at the Trout Underground, and if my high school English teacher was right, it’s because I lack the genes needed to correctly interpret it.

Still, when I posted (long ago) about David Fraser’s Killing Trout and Other Love Poems, I was interested enough to dip my ~~beautifully manicured~~ manscaped toe back in poetry’s metaphor-rich waters.

Fraser’s a fly fisherman and outdoorsman, and not surprisingly, the outdoors occupy a high profile in most of his poems.

Interestingly, this collection of spare, direct poems were compiled over several decades, and in places, you glimpse the progression of Fraser’s life.

The result is a collection of sharp, all-literary-encumbrances-removed poems that reminded me of John Gierach’s little-seen, pre-Trout Bum Signs of Life poetry collection.

Fraser doesn’t burden his poems with overripe metaphor or literary pretense. His is the art of carving away all that isn’t essential, and the result is a series of visceral glimpses into a life lived largely outdoors:

In Canoeing After Midnight, Fraser:

There are moments under
the full moon when there are clouds
and trees, and Octobers
and warm south winds

and the broad river
kicks up and everything else
is subdued but the sounds
and I point the canoe into the wind

and I am challenging the wind
and the river when I should be sleeping.
a fool again, with one paddle, huddled
in the reeds on the far side of the river,

always traveling to that other side to rest.
always knowing there will be no rest
until I get back, the bow cutting
through the bullshit and the boredom

Killing Trout’s 35 poems range from fun to darkly observant, and a few truly stand out.

Poets and poetry fanatics will want to lay their hands on this volume – as will anyone interested enough in poetry to have dug up Gierach’s first book of poems.

This book is also the first from an independent press largely powered by its online presence, and frankly, that’s a trend I’d like to encourage.

Speaking as an absolute novice in the field of poetry criticism, I’m giving Fraser’s Killing Trout & Other Love Poems two fins up, if only because I “got” it. And liked it.

See you in the coffeehouse, Tom Chandler

killing trout and other love poems, book review, poetry, killing trout, david fraser

An Underground Book Review: Something’s Fishy by Ted Williams

August 5, 2008, by Tom Chandler No comments yet

Something’s Fishy by Ted Williams is a strong entrant into the fly fishing book category; his well-researched environmental essays provoke, engage and often inflame.

An Underground Review: Fool’s Paradise by John Gierach

May 15, 2008, by Tom Chandler 7 comments

“I don’t have any illusions of permanence… It’s just that I can live with any number of things going straight to hell as long as these streams continue to hold up. If this amounts to living in a Fool’s Paradise, don’t waste your time trying to explain that to the fool.”

– John Gierach, Fool’s Paradise

With sixteen fly fishing books to his credit – all of which have been continuously in print since their release – John Gierach might just be fly fishing’s most-read writer. foolsparadisecover

Twenty years have passed since the publication of Gierach’s eponymous Trout Bum â€” a book that remains the favorite of many Gierach fans â€” and while Gierach’s perspective has evolved, his style remains recognizably (and comfortably) his own.

In his newest book — Fool’s Paradise — Gierach’s facility for one-liners and wry observation from outside the mainstream remain undiminished, and he combines the two frequently:

“I’m still waiting for Americans to realize that being in constant communication is not an advantage, but a short leash. Cell phones have changed us from a nation of self-reliant pioneer types into a bunch of men standing alone in supermarkets saying ‘Okay, I’m in the the tampon aisle, but I don’t see it.’”

Later â€” at the start of one of my favorite chapters in the book (“Creeks”) â€” Gierach does it again with:

“While killing time in a Starbucks in Portland, Oregon, not long ago, I was idly eavesdropping on two businessmen when one â€” invoking the tired cliche â€” said that their problems might be solved if they could start thinking outside the box. The other, younger man replied, ‘Dude, there’s no box.’”

Some fans might be shocked to hear that Gierach spent time in a Starbucks, or that he’s softening his stance on bamboo rods to the point that he fished a graphite rod all week long on another road trip:

“So one afternoon I was happily casting a foam stonefly pattern on a graphite rod when our guide said, ‘You know, if this gets out, you could lose your charter membership in the Old Farts’ Club.’”

Of course, revealing snapshots of your life to strangers comes at a cost; our view of Gierach is partially one of a writer who existed 20 years ago, and in the meantime, Gierach has moved along in his life, and frankly, that’s part of the allure of reading his newer books.

I mean, exactly what is happening with AK, Mike Clark, Ed Engle and the rest of the gang?

I’m tempted to suggest the “theme” of Fool’s Paradise revolves around the concept of change, and I could back it up with a lot of carefully selected passages, but in truth, that’s the kind of thing a critic says out loud while an author scratches his head and wonders what book the guy was reading.

Still, Gierach’s recent books (Fool’s Paradise is his first in three years) recognize the fact he’s not 30 any more, and in places, he does what you’d expect anyone approaching 60 might do; he looks back on his life.

To Gierach’s credit, he does so with a sense of wonder:

“This is how time occasionally works. One minute you’re a thirteen-year-old drowning worms for bluegills because muskies are among the countless things that are out of your league; the next minute you’re a decently preserved fifty-eight and finally landing a muskie. Surely all kinds of things have happened in between, but at the moment, you can’t remember any of them.”

On a fishing trip to the Fryingpan River with Jim Babb, Gierach cops to the changes that have occurred since he became a trout bum, though he also recognizes the dangers of relying on his own memory:

“One afternoon between hatches, I even started in on how the fish used to be bigger here but lost steam after I saw Jim’s skeptical glance. It does seem true, but then over the years we’ve drifted away from the shoulder-to-shoulder hog holes up under the dam (the most famous one is known as the ‘the Toilet Bowl’) into lesser, but also less crowded, water downstream that we’ve since come to know and love. And when I go back over old photos and see that the Fryingpan fish don’t seem as big as I remember, it’s not entirely reasonable to assume that all the snapshots of the really big trout must have gotten lost.

“Jim listened to all this politely, understanding that the old-timer’s litany we all grew up hearing becomes irresistible once you realize that the list of things that just aren’t the same anymore will soon include you â€” if it doesn’t already.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is Gierach’s wholly readable style. I’ve often said he’s a deceptive writer; he folds keen observation and surprising insight into essays so readable that you arrive at the “a-ha!” moment without realizing he’s been herding you that way the last four pages.

Fool’s Paradise will no doubt be snapped up by Gierach’s faithful.

Those looking for fly fishing instruction will be disappointed, though anyone looking for insight into the fly fishing life â€” without the trappings of ego that cloud the writings of so many others â€” will find this is a typically enjoyable (and re-readable) collection of essays.

[Note: You can find the dates & locations of Gierach's book tour here]

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