When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was moved by Vonnegut, Kesey, and Robbins. Now I am in my forties and those books don't elicit the same sort of response. This book does. It's the best of the late sixties and early seventies literature with the added maturity that twenty five or thirty years of experience brings. Reading The Brothers K has been a most entertaining reminder of the way things were, the way things still are, and the fundamental values of family life. It has affected my attitude and perspective, even my behavior. I've actually become more tolerant of the day to day foibles of my own three sons (at least temporarily) since diving into the world of the Chance brothers (thank you, David Duncan for that above all). The other readers' comments can fill you in on the plot and characters; I'll just say this -- if a 700 pate book seems too long, just read Book One -- 110 pages. Chances are, you'll be hooked on the Chances, and be the better for it.

Sigh. Who has time for the epics anymore? Not a college student, it would seem. "Read?" most scoff. "I haven't got time, what with my busy schedule, for a short story, let alone a big book that reaches nearly 700 pages in length."

Still, somewhere out there is the rare reader who likes the challenge an epic presents, loves to get lost in fascinating, multi-layered characterizations and plots that expand over decades.

For those readers, there is David James Duncan's 1992 offering, "The Brothers K." It excels on all those fronts I just mentioned, and on several more.

But when a friend recently handed it over to me, suggesting that I take a look, I too balked at its size:

"Look at it! Are you trying to kill any semblance of a social life I may have? This thing is mammoth and unwieldy!"

But my friend was persistent and so I went home and took a look. And soon became lost in the words, the story, the characters.

"Brothers K" is about the Chance family. Father Hugh is a mill worker who used to be the most promising baseball player around, until an accident at the mill cost him his dream. Mother Laura clings obsessively to her Adventist religion, since it once protected her from the darkest hour of her past.

Together, they have four boys and two twin girls. Everett is the oldest, a charming, witty rogue who doesn't share Laura's faith. Peter is next, and is a fellow cynic. Irwin is the large and innocent third child. Kincaid is a blank slate, who serves as the readers' eyes in the guise of the book's narrator.

The twin girls, Bet and Freddy, come later and more or less fulfill the role of younger sisters to the four brothers and little else, although they have a heartbreaking scene involving their grandmother's death that paves the way for the story to come full circle later.

Those are the characters. There is a plot, but Duncan takes it so lackadaisically and slow across the sands of time that in essence it can all be summed up in one word: Lifetime. For this is very much the saga of the Chance family, and all of their adventures therein.

We literally see the Chance boys grow up before our very eyes, watch as their characters age and grow, or regress, experience life and flirt with death.

Around halfway through the book, the four brothers (the "K" is an allusion to "The Brothers Karamazov," by Fyodor Dostoyevsky) each go off in search of their own way; Everett becomes a draft-dodger, Peter a philosopher, Kincaid a hippie, and Irwin goes to fight in Vietnam.

There is no rush on Duncan's part to tell the story, and so there can be no rush from the reader to finish it.

For this is a book in which the getting there is very much the draw, and readers are rewarded their patience by Duncan's sense of humor, sometimes gentle, other times abrasive, many times subtle and always hilarious.

But if you're the sort who seeks immediate gratification and "lite" escape from your reading, "Brothers K" is told in a series of broken up chapters and chapters-within-chapters, making it easier to simply pick it up, read a section or two and then return to whatever else you were doing.

If you can, that is. It's a hypnotic, intoxicating read, which will make putting the book down difficult.

And when you finally do finish, if you're like me, you will be so moved from the whole experience you will have to leave the room and walk the book off. It's that good.

Upon returning to your room, of course, there will be the brand-new temptation to pick it up and start all over again.

David James Duncan's style is so unique and so personal and descriptive you can't help but be pulled into his writing. It doesn't matter what he's writing about - you will find yourself hooked. His passion for life comes across in all of his work.


The Brothers K is my favourite novel of all time. Yes it is about baseball, religion, the 60's - but mostly it is about family. You will love reading this book but hate turning the last page.

This book is beautiful, simple, funny, and deep like a dark, swirling undercut bank of a good trout stream, in which secrets lurk, and wonder is promised on the very next cast. This is only fiction because the characters themselves are the creation of the author's imagination...yet in reality they are an amalgamation of all of us, each one having a purely human experience. Fishing is a metaphore in this book, not what the book is about, though folks who do fish, especially those who study the stream and just "know" where the fish will be will find a special appreciation for this book. It is philosophy told in the context of a story, like "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn, or Richard Bach's "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," or as has been mentioned many times, Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

I am certain that The River Why would be read and understood 60 different ways by any 50 people who read it. For me, it was a compelling journey of a young man, trying to navigate the waters of understanding between what is true, what is not, and finding that those two extremes don't exist. Old ways of seeing the world didn't work when he was confronted with real life "stuff," like death, love, time, and the creatures with whom we share this little wet planet. Over the course of a year on one of any Coast Range rivers of western Oregon, he discovered the "middle path," a path that made sense to him, brought him peace, brought him understanding, and ultimately brought him love, reunion with his family, and a sense of his place in the universe.

This is a book for those who are drawn to nature and native wisdom as doorways to spiritual insight. It is a book I will give away as gifts to special people whom I believe it could touch as it touched me. Spend 15 minutes with it, and you, too will be "hooked!"

Ocassionally, you read a book that becomes a part of you and stays with you long after you have put it down. David James Duncan has created nothing less than a tangible experience of reading. You will read countless glowing reviews, but the best thing you may do is read this contemporary classic for yourself. You will find yourself making references to your friends and family about characters like Gus, Titus, Eddie and even a dog named Descartes. You will laugh and cry with characters that become people, because of an author that writes as tenderly and sensitively as the river flows.

This may be the most meaningful novel I have ever read. Duncan's book takes the reader into a deeply touching world of ecology, wit, Spirit, desire and fish. Lots of fish. While I could heave accolades on the author's fabulous dialogues and descriptions or the level of character development, all of that would be to miss, what was to me, the greatest quality of the book. Duncan takes the reader into the searchings (and findings- kind of) of one Oregon soul. The reader will not only laugh, cry and ponder... the sensitive reader will travel with Gus Orviston and encounter life and vibrancy too scarce in our world. It is a transforming book. Read it. Read it on your knees. Read it while dancing. Read it sailing. Read this book.

David James Duncan is one of those rare writers that leaves you forever changed after encountering their work. I know I will gratefully never be the same after reading this book. I walked into it one person, and upon completing it, was another. His perceptions of the world are so rare that the fact he can write them down with such fathomless talent, passion and care, verges on unbelievable. I only come across writing this powerful once every five to ten years and count it a true blessing when it happens.
The portion titled "A Prayer for the Salmon's Second Coming" should be read by every single American period. In another chapter called "When Birdwatching Is a Blood Sport" he writes, "When wild elk, to remain alive, are forced to wipe out wild salmon, it is time, in my book, to get sad".
This book woke me up to many things I'd slept through. If you are more fortunate than I, and already awake, the words in this book will make your own words even more powerful. Buy it, read it, treasure it, share it. You'll never regret it.

My Story as Told by Water covers a varied terrain ranging from environmental activism to the virtues of fly-fishing without a hired guide. The book is really a collection of essays (many published in other books and periodicals) about rivers in the Northwestern United States. Duncan shares much of his early life growing up in neighborhoods just beyond the growing tentacles of Portland, Oregon. He writes openly about this family, including his bitter confrontation over the war in Vietnam with his dad, and the loss of his brother. Given such a backdrop, it's easy to understand how Duncan turned to the solitude of fishing local streams to deal with the pain of his youth.

Later in the book, Duncan finds his stride writing about the not-so-bright outlook facing wild salmon along the Columbia and Snake Rivers. You can almost feel the tears welling up in his eyes as he describes their near exit from his world. He sums up the disaster of the salmon run on the Snake River this way: "The babble of 'salmon management' rhetoric has taken a river of prayful human yearning, diverted it into a thousand word-filled ditches, and run it over alkali. When migratory creatures are prevented from migrating, they are no longer migratory creatures: they're kidnap victims. The name of the living vessel in which wild salmon evolved and still thrive is not 'fish bypass system,' 'smolt-deflecting diversionary strobe light,' or 'barge.' It is River."

Duncan opens his heart to the connections he has to rivers and wild fish. But more importantly, he gives us inspiration for making our own connections to those wild places.

Once again, David James Duncan captures most eloquently the inherent spirituality of nature. This collection of essays, speeches, and 1 song has moved me just as much as "The River Why", perhaps even more so, as this book is set in beautiful, raw, besieged reality. I dare you to read this book and not be inspired to make your corner of the world a little better, and a little more hospitable to every living thing. Duncan writes that he "became a nonfiction writer--after no apprenticeship whatever--at the age of 40. I did so not out of a sense of calling, but out of a sense of betrayal, out of rage over natural systems violated, out of grief for a loved world raped, and out of a craving for justice." This is the passion that forms this book, a book created in love for the rivers his writing sings for, and anger for the desecration of those same rivers. BUY THIS BOOK!

This book is sentimental, overwritten, trendy and sickeningly mediocre. Duncan may very well be the master of kitch readers crave from years of Hollywood molding their aesthetic preferences. Perhaps it would not be so bad if Duncan actually had some biting or original insight into human lives or the human condition. He appropriates "eastern philosophy" to not only trivialize the philosophy itself, but to make his lack of originality transparent. With Duncan, eastern religion can indeed be bought in a Santa Barbara bead boutique or between the lines of a hippie's banter.

YES! It truly is a horrifying experience to get lost in the store when one is a toddler. But Duncan's style and knack for cheese reduce such moments to the most trite melodrama. He is the classic example of the writer who has used more words than he knows what to do with. If you admire the aesthetics of Hallmark cards, buy this book and swoon away.

For better nature writers, turn to Henry David Thoreau, (early) Robert Bly, Paul Theroux or even Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. Compared to Duncan, a man like Hawthorne takes readers closer to nature by having characters walk through a forest.

as I read this book. Although I don't like fishing (Duncan's favorite subject), I do like good stories. And Duncan knows how to write them. This book is easy to read because it is a compilation of short stories, albeit some better than others. But all the stories are worth reading at least once. And believe me, after the first time, you will be returning to read a few of the stories over and over. I know I did.

I was a hitch-hikn' looking for Sissy out there somewhere and along comes this book with the upside down fish-hook on it and I finally had the term for my favorite piece of women's clothing (i.e. 'the upper tenth of a pair of levis').

Ten years later I was having babies and was reading The Brothers K with my son asleep on my chest.

Now, well beyond that divorce, I find "home" in David's stories in River Teeth. His attention to me not his characters is extremely evident through his writing. I can still get chills up my spine just thinking about that Oregon concert when the lightning and thunder peeled...

A Rose Red City is a short but enjoyable book. As I recall -- and I admit that it's been a while since I read it -- the tale is one that centers around the "saving" of individuals, by offering them Greek-style immortality. This device allows for an examination of the differing attitudes and priorities of mortals vs. immortals; further, because "rescue" attempts ensure that immortals are temporarily rendered mortal, it allows us to see how they deal with vulnerability, and ultimately, being human.

I thought this book was awesome!!! It was well written. Dave Duncan makes you sink into this book and visualize you were there. I'd recomend this book to anyone!!!! Trust me... you'd have a few suprises along the way. Being a short book I didn't think it would've been as good as it was, but it WAS!!!!

I picked up "Shadow" after thoroughly enjoying Duncan's "Man of His Word" series. I was hoping for another good-natured, fun book. What I received was much more: Shadow is the tale of a man who becomes a noble's bodyguard - and takes the title of Shadow. His life becomes inextricably tied to that of his master. (thats the basic synopsis, since there isn't one given).

Although there are a few cliched characters in the book, the main cast is a well-rounded bunch that came alive for me. Duncan examines questions of honor and loyalty -- personal loyalty vs. loyalty to the crown -- in the midst of a compelling story.

The setting of the world is one of the most unique I have come across in a long time and for that alone I had to go back and reread the novel.

All-in-all, I would strongly recommend picking up Shadow -- you won't be dissappointed.