Books in Brief: The Ultimate Fishing Book

The Ultimate Fishing Book, edited by Lee Eisenberg and DeCourcy Taylor (Houghton Mifflin, 225 pp., $40). It isn’t. At least, not in the same way its predecessor, The Ultimate Baseball Book, was conceivably the last word on that subject. The ghost of Arnold Gingrich, who once wrote that some of the best fishing was done in print, presides over this book. And it is indeed beautifully illustrated, and filled with some excellent essays by the likes of John Graves, Vance Bourjaily, Geoffrey Norman, and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. The authors are all purists: Geoffrey Norman, for one, realizes that “The important thing becomes doing it right. It has something to do with style and something to do with taste.” Listen to Mr. Norman as he describes the magic of a cane fishing rod: “There is something about owning a fine thing that you can also use that I find alluring.” Robert E. Jones tells a nostalgic and funny story about fishing for musky, pausing on the way to relate the episode of the day his uncle flicked a cigar ash into the water, was hit by a northern pike, and proceeded to haul it into the boat, its jaws still clamped around his hand, and beat it to death with an empty bottle of Blatz beer. There are also no end of splendid vintage fishing lodges here, as well as a procession of aged and inevitably philosophical anglers. Despite such swell stuff, this book falls short of the ultimate because it virtually ignores salt-water fishing. You may have trout, but you have no weakfish. You have muskellunge, but no bluefish, kingfish, fluke, striped bass, or tuna. In short, this is only half the story. Very good, but half the story nevertheless.