Ian Frazier - The Fish's Eye

from the publisher:
In The Fish's Eye, Ian Frazier explores his lifelong passion for fishing, fish, and the aquatic world. He sees the angler's environment all around him -- in New York's Grand Central Terminal, in the cement-lined pond of a city park, in a shimmering bonefish flat in the Florida Keys, in the trout streams of the Rocky Mountains. He marvels at the fishing in the turbid Ohio River by downtown Cincinnati, where a good bait for catfish is half a White Castle french fry. The incidentals of the angling experience, the who and the where of it interest him as much as what he catches and how. The essays (including the famous profile of master angler Jim Deren, late proprietor of New York City's tackle store the Angler's Roost) contain sharply focused observations of the American outdoors, a place filled with human alterations and detritus which somehow remains defiantly unruined. Frazier's simple love of the sport lifts him to straight-ahead angling description that's among the best contemporary writing on the subject. The Fish's Eye brings together twenty years of heartfelt and funny and vivid essays on a timeless pursuit where so many mysteries, both human and natural, coincide.

"Frazier is a great storyteller." --Laura Shapiro, Newsweek

"Reading [Ian Frazier] one thinks of such American originals as John McPhee, Wallace Stegner, Edward Hoagloand, Peter Matthiessen and Evan S. Connell." --Ron Hansen, The Washington Post Book World