Posts tagged “books”

A Passion For Tarpon

Posted on March 25, 2011

A Passion For Tarpon is dense. I received a review copy a long time ago, August I think. I wanted to read through it before commenting. Seven months later, here are my thoughts. This book surprised me. Hearing some pre-press buzz back in early 2010, I had expectations of this being an ego showcase for Andy Mill, regarded by many to be the best tarpon angler in the world. But it’s not that at all. It features lengthy, unfiltered interviews with pioneers and legends like Steve Huff, Bill Curtis, Stu Apte, Sandy Moret, Tom McGuane and others. Steve Kantner, (the “Land Captain” and the king of Florida ditch fishing) contributed an essay on the history of chasing tarpon. Interspersed in between the historical chapters,…

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Hard at Work

Posted on October 26, 2009

Tosh Brown and I have been working on making an idea for a book project a reality. A “large format pictorial on fly-fishing the Northeast coast” won’t work without large format-worthy pictures. So we’re blasting our way through some of the fall run this week. We’re in the middle of fishing around New York Metro and surrounding salt, with Tosh working the lens.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Big One

Posted on April 17, 2009

Score one for participatory journalism. In 2007 David Kinney, a career newspaperman, dove headfirst into the collective insanity that is the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. The result is The Big One, an exhaustively researched window into the people and culture that fuel the derby, and the mania that fuels them. It would be tempting to think this was an easy book to write; go fishing and then type it all out. That would be incorrect. Kinney deserves credit for gaining access to a group so paranoid and insular that getting any of them to talk and take him fishing is remarkable. (In fact, reading some passages, you’re left to wonder if the source is on the level or passing along blatant…

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Bloggers With Book Deals

Posted on November 21, 2008

A guide in Alaska named Miles Nolte posts accounts from his life on the river into a thread on The Drake Magazine forums. The thread gets a following. One of the readers starts a publishing company. He signs up Nolte to write a book based on his thread: The AK Chronicles Start a blog or thread or something and you never know. Look what happened to the guy who did Stuff White People Like.

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BOOK REVIEW: Muskie on the Fly

Posted on September 25, 2008

Having spent many summers on a river where catching a muskellunge is an achievement that gets noted in the local paper, and having witnessed exactly one person hook one on the fly, I’ve looked forward to reading  Muskie on the Fly, by Robert Tomes, as much as any other fly fishing instructional book. As someone who ranks the muskie high on his fly fishing wish list, I am not disappointed. Muskie on the Fly falls in line with other books from Wild River Press, such as Fly Fishing for Striped Bass, in that it is obsessive, compulsive, and encyclopedic in its depth of coverage. And that it is packaged as an expensive glossy hardcover. As with the striper book, if someone buys this with…

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Fishing with Dynamite

Posted on July 8, 2008

Reading a book called Gladesmen: Gator Hunters, Moonshiners, and Skiffers, about the pre-park Everglades in the 1920s and 30′s. It’s a colorful read, with firsthand narrative like this: Well back in the ’20s and ’30s, dynamiting fish was quite common, although it was illegal then too. But you could buy dynamite then over the counter at the Horn Hardware and Lumber Company. Even kids could buy dynamite. And, you know, we lived right next to a big magazine of dynamite. Wasn’t over two or three hundred yards from us. If that thing had gone off, it would have blowed us slap into that Long Glade. When fishing with dynamite, the older men would usually gather up us yearling boys and head to a canal…

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