Careful, You Might Get Hooked. rating: 5
Just enough taste of Traver's life and philosophy to make you want more. You get a picture of a self-effacing man who downplays his professional achievements as well as his fly-fishing mastery. Although he frequently laments that he wasted his life fishing in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, you discover he was a successful district attorney, defense attorney, and state supreme court justice as well as a best-selling fiction author (Anatomy of a Murder). While he downplays his abilities as a fisherman, you learn he gave public flycasting demonstrations that brought the audience to their feet. Makes you yearn to be one of the boys who gather at Frenchman's pond for a warm summer day of brown trout on dry flies with long, thin leaders, followed by a night of cribbage and whisky sours from a tin cup. Traver will teach you as much about life as about fishing, and make you appreciate both more. The technical info on fly-fishing gear was current when Ike was in the White House; but this isn't a how-to fish book, it is a why-to fish book; and I'm glad I discovered it and Robert Traver.
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