The New Fly Fishing Books

Christopher Buckley reviews imaginary fly fishing books in a June 1994 column in The New Yorker.

"Extreme Fly Fishing," by Budd Revill, a former Navy SEAL whose macho approach includes using a rattan cane of the kind used on U.S. teens in Singapore. It's got a nice feel to it he observes.

White Beads, Brown Trout," by J. H. Wells, a lay Zen monk from upstate N.Y. with the maxim "Should you desire the great tranquillity, prepare to sweat white beads. One day while casting for a humongous brown trout in the Beaverkill River, near Roscoe, New York, Wells found himself asking, "What is the point?"

"Gills," by Peter Benchley, author of "Jaws," about a vengeful Dolly Varden trout that terrorizes a fishing camp in British Columbia.Trouble starts when the fearsome, sixteen inch monster attacks a female wildlife biologist. 

"The Apostle and the Nymph," by Elgar Cole, Ph.D., a biblical archeologist who challenges Norman Maclean's famous asseveration in "A River Runs Through It" that the Apostle John was a dry-fly fisherman. He draws on his excavation of Ut-Ekmek 2, in modern day Israel, where, he says, John and the other Apostles used to go wet fly fishing during the annual landlocked-salmon run.

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