The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing

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.

ISBN-13: 9781635573077

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Publication Date: 03-02-2021

Pages: 304

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling author of Milk!, Havana, Paper, The Big Oyster, 1968, Salt, The Basque History of the World, Cod, and Salmon, among other titles. He has received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Bon Appétit's Food Writer of the Year Award, the James Beard Award, and the Glenfiddich Award. He lives in New York City. www.markkurlansky.com

Table of Contents

Prologue: Winter Without Tolstoy on the Big Wood River xiii

1 Why? 1

2 Doing It the Hard Way 18

3 The Thinking Prey 38

4 Who Started This? 61

5 American Fly Fishing 92

6 It's About the Fly 118

7 The Comfort of My Rod 158

8 Send You Reeling 177

9 A Good Line 188

10 Wading In 195

11 Fisherwomen 204

12 Difficult Thoughts 216

13 Fishing for Words 226

Epilogue: Yeats on the Blackwater 248

Acknowledgments 259

Appendix: Rivers in This Book 261

List of Illustrations 263

Bibliography 265

Index 273

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