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Library | Material Type | Shelf Number | Child Count | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Central | Book | 799.1 QUI | 1 | Stacks | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
This book is a mix of anecdotes, observations, essays, short stories, one-liners, and personal revelations from the autho'rs life and fishing journals.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With 90 one- to four-page long essays ranging from "Gonzo Fishing" to "When You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Take Him Fishing," Quinnett (Pavlov's Trout and Darwin's Bass) clearly views angling as a necessary adjunct to life. Fishing is a chancy endeavor, otherwise, he notes, "[t]hey'd call it catching." Quinnett, a psychologist specializing in suicide, sees the pursuit of trout et al. as a metaphor for the good and interesting life. It leads to clockless dreamlands away from the chaos of everyday work. And, by his calculations, it makes great economic sense, with a decent rod and reel costing only .043 pennies a dayfor a person who lives 28,000 days. "If you can't see the logic of this," he writes, "you are obviously not a fisherman." A fisherman himself for half a century, Quinnett recalls the public civility and private anguish of old-timers when newcomers catch a giant bass with nothing but beginner's luck; and discusses the bad or funny things that must happen to fishermen because "[a] fishing trip without laughter is not much of a fishing trip." Fishing is about "being free for a few hours, and spending time with those we love." Time is not money, he maintains, because money never bought back any of the time spent earning it. Although Quinnett says that fish and philosophy go together, readers will find these breezy episodes much more fun than Aristotelian syllogisms. (Oct.) FYI: Two other books for fishermen are John Bailey's illustrated Ultimate Freshwater Fishing (DK, $29.95 190p ISBN 0-7894-2866-0; Sept.); & Lyons Press's chapbook The Quotable Fisherman, edited by Nick Lyons. ($20 176p ISBN 1-55821-717-7; Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Bland fishing stories that artlessly dovetail into life lessons, from Quinnett (The Troubled People Book, 1982). This collection of brief sketches circles around the ``great universal comedy of errors that is angling, and life. That coy comma is critical to Quinnett's approach: He may like to ``do something crazy once in a whileotherwise life turns into tofu,'' but he knows how to wring from each boyish escapade some nugget of timeless wisdom, yessirree, (such as that death is forever or ``being close to the things your true heart loves is the surest source of joy''). The Introductionan ain't-I-fine, ain't-I-grand autobiographical snippet in which he actually says his books are ``the first books ever written on the psychology of fishing (is this tongue-in-cheek? aren't most fishing books just that?)is the first indication that things are going to get a little self-righteous, with lots of garlicky sermons pushed our way. And true to form, platitudes trip over truisms in the pages that follow. Perhaps YOU didn't know ``that materialism creeps up on you'' or that ``a fishing trip without laughter is not much of a fishing trip.'' Well, now YOUre the wiser. Quinnett enjoys the notion that as he rumbles toward his sixth decade, he is still a merry prankstersound judgement can take an awful lot of fun out of being alive,'' and remember that ``you may only be young once, but you can be immature your whole life''though he is never short on judgements and grown-up advice. Nearly every chapter (and there are 90 of them) ends with a horrid one-liner so atrociously trite''The joy of fishing is not only about catching fish, but about being in places where fish are caught''you want to kick it. Predictable and forgettable. Readers are advised to go fishing instead.