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My Secret Fishing Life
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by Nick Lyons and Mari Lyons
Sales Rank : 687598
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Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Grove Press October 7, 2001
Language: English
ISBN-10: 080213842X
ISBN-13: 978-0802138422
Product Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
Product Review
"There are many of us," writes Nick Lyons, six decades on the pond behind him, "for whom a day on the trout river is so pleasant an event, such an amiable and engaging pastime, that it feels, both going and coming back, as comfortable as an old shoe. We go for the sheer joy of it, not to put notches on our rods." Anglers keep returning to Lyons's finely honed prose for precisely the same reason. The collection of essays that comprises My Secret Fishing Life is a personal journey into the various "rivers" he's waded as a husband, father, teacher, writer, collector, publisher--and, of course, as a fisherman, the single noun that manages to tie all these lines together. The shorter pieces of the first half, many of which were originally published in Fly Fisherman magazine, explore subsets of the fishing life, drifting casually between philosophical rumination and memoir: the rituals of preparing for a new season, getting older, a lunchbreak spent fishing for stripers in the waters off Wall Street. In such sketches he presents his languid yet alluring phrases as delicately as if they were flies to a rising trout. Here he is on the inherent purity of the dry fly: "The only possible practical argument for using the dry fly more frequently is Lee Wulff's--that the dry fly fished on a floating line grants for the trout the sanctuary of its part of the river, allowing the connection to take place only at that place where air and water meet, and only at certain times." Two longer pieces comprising the book's second half are less successful--maybe too personal here and there (especially a windy defense of his wife's painting career), but overall it's honest, thoughtful work. Like fly-fishing as a sporting enterprise, the writing casts more toward the journey than the destination, allowing itself to hook into a share of verities along the way. --Jeff Silverman
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Within the pond of those who write about fly-fishing, Lyons is one of the bigger fish. He has authored 16 titles (In Praise of Wild Trout, etc.) on the evidently inexhaustible subject and has published others' books on the art and mystique of fly-fishing. This is his most introspective book yet: "I have tried to find more of what my professional life has amounted to than ever before and more of my personal life." That he had a personal life at all is amazing given that, for 13 years, he was a full-time editor at Crown, taught five courses at Hunter College (where colleagues looked askance at his fishing articles and books, unable to see what such low-brow pursuits had to do with his professorship), ghostwrote four books and continued with his own writingAand had four children. He later started a book-packaging firm, Lyons & Burford, which became an independent house; now he heads Lyons Press. Even so, Lyons found time to go fishing, and there are plenty of fish tales here, spiced with references to Hesse, Twain, Melville, Max Planck, Byron and others. Lyons succeeds at what he sets out to do: show how the various loves and obsessions of a life interlock. Fly fishers and publishing folk alike will welcome the effort. In a marvelous passage, Lyons describes his discovery of the voice with which he first wrote about fishing, as opposed to the one he employed as an English professor: the new voice was "earthy, nimble, wry, full of wit and worms and celebration." He's still got it.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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