Gleaned from more than 450 hours of live radio interviews, Fly Fishing Is Spoken Here is a handsome volume that belongs on the bookshelf of every literate fly fisher. Interviews with the likes of James Prosek, Ernest Schwiebert, Valerie Haig-Brown, Joseph Humphreys, Robert Linsenman, Fen Montaigne, and ten others provide a unique perspective not only on these individuals but on the sport they clearly love.

Credit editor Stephen Sloan, perhaps best thought of as the Larry King of the fishing world, for recognizing the unique vitality of the spoken word and capturing its essence in these interviews collected from his weekly nationally syndicated radio show, "The Fishing Zone." That this collection originated as dialogue, with all the spontaneity and flow of conversation intact and preserved, ensures that each of the interviews captured bears an immediacy and honesty seldom retained in conventional narrative about the sport. It's surely no accident that the effect of reading this book bears no small resemblance to the sport it explores: it's somewhat like immersing oneself in a trout stream, fly rod in hand, and enjoying the unpredictable process of discovering the treasures that lie within.

And credit publisher William Trego with creating yet another beautiful limited-edition volume from his Meadow Run Press. The heir apparent to the Derrydale Press of an earlier generation, no other publisher of sporting titles today produces books of such consistently high quality and beauty, and this volume certainly adds to that well-deserved reputation. Slipcased and with original paintings and drawings by the subject of the book's opening interview, James Prosek-a young artist hailed by The New York Times as "a fair bid to become the Audubon of the fishing world"-this is a book with, believe it or not, heft and beauty significant enough to outweigh and obscure its hundred-dollar price tag. Each of the 750 copies is signed by Sloan and Prosek, ensuring that this book is certain to remain in high demand.

Prosec's view of life, even just angling and love, from the elevation of >26 years is underwhelming, especially compared to his pictures which are little devotions for my eye. By comparison, his topic and his prose here is like reading a cloying love letter from camp.

Keep drawing, Jim!

Don't think twice..buy anything authored by Prosek. He is an amazing writer now. As he ages his writer's (and painter's) eye will absorb more. If we are lucky, we will look at his observations and see if we can learn his methods. This is the examined life and it is worth every minute of the very fast read.

GRO

I have been a public school teacher since 1982, and I have taught in five different school systems.

Over the summer I read James Prosek's latest book on: Early Love and Trout. I found myself re-reading certain lines and smiling. I thought it was wonderful to find a book for Middle School and High School students that they can identify with at their present stage in life. The emotions and feelings James writes of, are theirs at this moment - the value of friendship, the excitement of new love and the pain caused by divorce. I think is particularly poignant how James describes how he dealt with that pain. Instead of anger, drugs and alcohol, James put all of his energy into nature. Finding new fishing places, and re-gaining his innocence, rather than becoming an angry and bitter individual.

Throughout the book, James's art compliments the stories like beautiful lyrics to a haunting melody.

I truly recommend this book as a gift or as an excellent choice as requirement reading for High School or Middle School Students.

Being a scientific illustrator of fish, I dare say a few words about this book. These fish are pleasant to look at but the art work is no masterpiece. On my first attempts at color, i could easily do that kind of work.

After reading the reviews on this one I was just giddy with anticipation when it arrived. Any book on fish or fishing is a good one, and this one promised to be very good.

I don't read new books front to back - I browse at first, and flipped through "Trout", very impressed with the number of species and the marvellous illustrations. Then I went to Brook Trout - the fish of my youth, and still the one nearest and dearest my heart. Very good illustration and text.

I then went to the front and started through, and as fate would have it the Arctic Char was first up. That's when I started to worry. You see, I live in the Canadian Arctic, and have seen lots of Arctic Char - literally tens of thousands. I've studied them, fished them, eaten them, read about them, and learned about them. I am no "expert", but I know a few things.

Th fact of the matter is that from reading the text accompanying the illustration of the Arctic Charr, it is obvious that Prosek knows little of them. For example, he writes, "Eskimos cut a hole in a lake through ten feet of ice, fishing with a piece of seal meat on an ivory hook." Do tell. It gets better with, "In summer when the rivers run free, they catch them in nets made of Musk-ox or caribou sinew." Really. That stuff would have been half truths two centuries ago - today it is just plain wrong.

Those lines are tourist fiction reminiscent of the hogwash written by the early arctic explorers who, after a trip up north, could return home and write any mix of truth and fiction they wanted - because nobody knew any better.

That's my problem with the book. He knows little of Arctic Char, but proceeded anyway to write an inaccurate text - without the qualifier - "by the way I don't really know this, somebody told me and I didn't have time to check it out". Thinking what? Nobody would notice?

It's the other species in the book that worry me now - the odd, rare, and primarily western ones I have not had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with. Is that stuff accurate?

Still a great and very enjoyable book, and I recommend it to anyone who loves (okay, likes) trout. Enjoy the illustrations - just don't count on the information without checking it out.

Trout fishing is the most enjoyable thing I've ever experienced (yeah, even better than that!) Most of the books on trout lead you to believe that you have to achieve succeedingly higher levels of consciousness through concerted study of stream ecology, purchase of the most expensive equipment available, and years and years of practice and frustration in perfecting your casting skills. I've yet to see a book that simplifies the whole thing and tells you how you can wade into a stream in sneakers and shorts, armed with very little more than your rod, reel, and a few flies, and start catching fish right away.

No, Prosek's book doesn't do any of that, but it hints at the essential simplicity of trout fishing. The illustrations are riveting and serve well as reference plates. The commentary is blessedly sparse and gets to the point. It's a truly beautiful book and an obvious labor of love. Since so much literary claptrap surrounds fly fishing, I would have to compare most books on the subject to "Ulysses", while Prosek has produced a haiku that couples art and science. (I'm about to gag at my own literary allusion!)

If you want to get into the trout and fly obsession, buy this book for inspiration. Then, I guess I'll just have to write that book about cut-rate, simplified fly fishing as your next step!

It has often been said that, amidst the voluminous writing on sports, only baseball, boxing, horse racing and fly fishing have produced any literature of enduring value. Fly fishing, of course, is a pursuit of the literary classes, so it is no surprise that it has been the subject of an inordinate amount of fine writing. The hot young writer in this distinct niche is young James Prosek, who published Trout: An Illustrated History (1996) while still a Yale undergraduate. Prosek is not only a capable author, he also paints fine watercolors to accompany his own text and he has set the hearts of middle aged white male fishing aficionados aflutter.

In Joe and Me, he has written a memoir of his youth in Connecticut and of his relationship with Joe Haines, a local game warden who busted him fishing illegally and then took him under his wing. Prosek's parents were divorced and, though James appears to have continued living with his Dad, Joe seems to have become something of a surrogate father. Joe taught him about everything from surf casting for bluefish to rendering a bull, from clamming to picking blue berries, with gruff good humor and great generosity at almost every step of the way.

Perhaps this is purely a personal reaction, but I found myself really liking the somewhat curmudgeonly Joe and wanting to give James a good shake. He seems not to fully realize his great good fortune in having such a mentor. If Joe is sometimes a little too sarcastic or impatient or seems too braggadocious, this is more than outweighed by his willingness to include this callow youth in his world and too share a lifetime of knowledge with him. I am cognizant of the fact that I am saying that the author of a book about a man is unappreciative of that man. But truthfully, I am even bothered by the fact that the title is "Joe and Me". How about just "Joe"?

I didn't dislike this book, but I was disappointed in the overall tone. Perhaps success has come too quickly for the author and he will benefit from the perspective that age will bring. I, for one, think this would be a much different, and better, book if he rewrote it later in life.

GRADE: C+

The novel Joe and Me by James Prosek is a book about a special relationship between a ranger named Joe Haines and a young boy by the name of James Prosek. James was caught trespassing and fishing without a permit in a local pond near his home in Connecticut. But instead of running a way like his friend, James dropped his rod and surrendered. This move would change his life forever. Joe took James home and explained to him that he could catch just as many fish with out trespassing or breaking any laws. From that point on Joe and James' relationship began to grow. Joe began taking James along with him on many fishing trips and other outdoor adventures. He taught James all he could ever want to know about the great outdoors. Although Joe was much older than James, he never treated James like a little kid or like he would a son. Joe treated James like a friend.

This is one the best educational books not only on fishing but also on friendship that I have ever read. The tone of the book was pleasant and serious as Joe taught James about fishing and friendship. The weakness of the book was that each chapter was an essay that made the story line choppy. The strength of the book was the easy lessons on fishing and friendship.

A fishing guide friend lent us Joe & Me, which I just finished reading on a cold, rainy March afternoon, lying on the couch with a fire in the fireplace. A perfect way to spend the day, although you'll do equally well under a tree or on a park bench this summer. The simplicity of James' writing evokes "My Old Man and the Sea", to my mind one of Hemingway's best. Prosek's watercolors that illustrate the text are a joy as well, and I am ordering the hardcover to keep by the aforementioned couch. A must for anyone who enjoys a respite from the stress of our modern day lives. I can't wait to read more of Prosek's work.

James Prosek's gone fishin' in a big way. But that doesn't mean he's divorced himself from reality in favor of pastoral bliss the way fishermen so often do. In Fly-Fishing the 41st: Around the World on the 41st Parallel, the famed fishing writer loops the planet along one of its most interesting latitudinal lines, stopping in Mongolia and Japan, among other places, to find out what's biting.

Prosek's search for a native trout from the source of the Tigris River takes him into militarized Serbia and war-torn Yugoslavia. The 41st also takes the young writer directly through Paris, where he finds that the Seine River, once too polluted to support life forms of any kind, now lures a quirky subculture of inner-Paris anglers who-thanks to recent clean-ups on the river-routinely fish there for eel, bream and silure, a catfish-like creature that grows to enormous proportions.

In one of the liveliest passages of Fly-Fishing, the American author pulls up a 50-pound silure to the amusement and applause of a Paris audience, and his photo makes it into the French press along with a story that paints him as a "tourist" catching a "marine monster."

One of the many delights in Prosek's gem-laden narrative is a cast of characters from the international fraternity of the fishing-obsessed. Here you will meet Johannes Schoffmann, an Austrian baker who spends his spare hours researching the intricacies of trout. Though he is not a trained scientist himself, Schoffmann's studies are so meticulous and his travels so heroic, he has made himself indispensable to more than one university professor researching trout DNA.

Here you will also meet Francois Calmejane, a French tax inspector celebrated for busting big-time tax evaders. When he is not sleuthing tax fraud in his green ostrich leather vest and Holmes-style meerschaum pipe, Calmejane sculpts giant fish and flies out of iron and fishing-related found objects like hooks and spears. Prosek falls in love with Calmejane's dark, quirky work and buys a giant trout sculpture on his last day in Paris, because, as he tells the artist, he doesn't have any choice.

"I wished more things were so clear in life as a trout stream or good art," Prosek concludes in one of the verbal jewels that will make this book a hit not only with sport fishermen, but with anyone who likes to read well-written adventure.

James Prosek, "the young Audubon" of trout and fly fishing, has done it again with his latest book "Fly Fishing on the 41st." He seems to go from strength to strength. What at first seemed like a stunt, to fish around the globe on the 41st parallel, turns out to be a rich taste of ichthyology, sociology, geography, and biography, to say nothing of Prosek's appealing illustrative art.
This is far more than any one of these fields by itself. For in combining all of them, he takes the reader on an engrossing journey, serious in its aim, yet fascinating in its account of "schwarzfishers" and their adventures seeking trout, often in officially forbidden territory, but in fact acceptable to any true sportsman. For the main thrust is catch and release, keeping what he and his companions caught only for scientific purposes (except for the occasional campers' meal.)
Prosek's emphasis on limning the various couontries visited, the fishermen who were his companions and the wide variety of trout in the world all combine to make this a very readable book for a wide audience. I recommend it highly for anyone.

This book tries very hard to be "deep" and insightful; it is neither. This is not a book about the human condition; it is a book about a privileged young man fishing with privileged old people.

Prosek does lovely paintings, but the bottom line is that his writing lacks maturity. He violates many rules that should have been drilled into his head during "freshman comp" class. He doesn't show, he tells. He overuses flowery adjectives. And he can be melodramatic to the extreme.

There is no shortage of books about flyfishing that are filled with overblown prose, books that try to make flyfishing something it is not. This book is one of them.

Comparisons to Izaak Walton abound. This gets old after a while. So do the many "characters" Prosek fishes with, who we are told are very interesting and "quite delightful," but most seemed to be pompous, bland individuals.

For some reason, the trip itself bothered me. He got to fish many rivers only because he was a young man of privilege. Everyone he meets is awed by him, mainly because he is an Ivy Leaguer with the right connections. He then makes sure we know that the class-obsessed people he meet complimented him on his "class" and "character." He seems to revel in this, never examining his privilege. Many times I wanted him to quit rhapsodizing over trout and start examining his own life.

I was very disappointed in Prosek as a writer. It lacks the depth of a good travel book (like Fen Montaigne's "Reeling in Russia"). And he can't compare to sporting writers like McGuane, Bodio, Tom McIntyre and Robert F. Jones, all writers whose books reflect fierce joy, love, pain, conflict, and ambiguity.

I understand Prosek is now writing about love. Be very afraid.

Let's face it, this is not a very good book. There is a tendency among those who fly fish to readily accept any ink put to paper as elegaic, contemplative and downright superior. Young Mr. Prosek is a fortunate lad, having pulled the wool over the eyes of the academic sachems at Yale to bless his fly fishing vacation in England as the subject of his thesis. He wraps the proposal in the esteemed pages of Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler, the most purchased and least read book in the history of print. Prosek forces us to wade through a number of English rivers and some tedious prose, and in this respect he does resemble Walton. His constant comparisons of himself to Walton tend to bog down his writing. He ruminates on how he is standing in the same water that Walton once stood, the worst kind of conceit. You don't even stand in the same river yourself when you happen to be standing in one! The only redeeming feature of this volume is that it is beautiful book, with Prosek's watercolors generously peppered throughout. He is a gifted painter and his first book is one of my favorites. This volume, however, has more of the red herring about it than the noble trout. I admire a good con job, I just hate it when it's pulled on me.

Having read Prosek's other two books (and having thoroughly enjoyed them, and given copies as gifts), I really look forward to reading this one - long anticipated. This young man has unusual talents, and (at least as of a couple of years ago) possesses another rare quality today - humility and politeness.