A wise, affectionate chronicle of a passion pursued.
Have rod, will travel: the education of a devoted fly fisherman.
“Angling is about anticipation and planning trips far in the future, but it also has a storied history,” writes Coggins. “This sport has been practiced since Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler was published in 1653, in ways that are, to the naked eye, fairly unchanged today, like a Shakespeare play performed on a thrust stage.” Coggins, who writes about fishing for the Robb Report, adds to the canon with this reflective, leisurely travelogue about some of his favorite fishing spots. Because anglers, like gamblers, are addicted to the “chance of winning,” they must be optimists: The “angler is master of a kingdom that always threatens to crumble.” Coggins reminiscences about when he went fly-fishing for smallmouth bass in Wisconsin with his grandfather’s friends and learned the fine arts of casting and maneuvering a canoe and the vernacular of bobbers, leaders, and flies. Then the author takes us to see the cutthroat trout in the “mecca of American angling,” Montana, a state that “calls the faithful like the Louvre calls painters.” Of course, there were plenty of mistakes—e.g., a broken rod and the humiliation of losing a trout that “broke me off”—before he caught “a perfect fish.” Coggins also recounts his trip to the “wonderfully isolated and remote” flats of the Bahamas to experience saltwater fishing and to catch a fish he’s never seen before, the “silver phantom” bonefish. In Patagonia, the author sought rainbow trout, the “golden retriever of fish,” whose luminous color “mirrors the joy of catching one.” Among the author’s many other adventures: chasing striped bass in New York’s Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, running with Atlantic salmon in New Brunswick, Canada (“many shattered dreams lay at the altar of this revered fish”), and pond fishing for brook trout in the Maine North Woods, “a 3.5-million-acre wilderness that extends all the way to Canada.”
A wise, affectionate chronicle of a passion pursued.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982152-50-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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