Fishing Came First

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Cole claims to be the Blanche DuBois of fishermen; he writes that he has always depended on the kindness of strangers. This memoir, covering five decades in pursuit of the noble sport, is utter delight for anglers. As a teenager, Cole preferred fishing to tennis; when an elderly friend of the family invited him to go fishing he was ecstatic. Years later, he in turn put a bamboo pole in the hands of his three-year-old son. Cole ( Striper ) describes fishing trips in the Florida Keys, Long Island, the Gulf of Maine, on a cleaned-up Kennebec River, a salmon river in maritime Canada, Iceland and Alaska. We observe his developing skills as an angler and the evolution of a philosophy about the sport. Cole conveys the drama of flyfishing--``every motion of the fish communicates straight from the creature to the angler's fingers and from those fingers to his consciousness.'' He has all the enthusiasm of fisherman Jimmy Carter and his writing skills place him among the best of breed. (Sept.)

Library Journal

In his literary career Cole has touched on a variety of subjects from life in Maine to the story of amaranth. The present volume is his third fish tome, having been preceded by Striper and Salmon . Cole does not pretend to be an authority on angling; the 17 essays in Fishing Came First are primarily about feelings rather than techniques. There are more pounds of fish lost than boated, more released than brought home, but captured prey is not the subject of these elegant and intuitive observations which range, geographically, from Iceland to the Marquesa Islands, with a side trip to Alaska. The title of the book is not a temporal statement but an indication of priorities; the interest relegated to second place is the reproductive act, a ranking intended more to enhance the one than to disparage the other. Fishing means something to Cole, and he conveys the message beautifully.-- David J. Panciera, Westerly P.L., R.I.