In Praise of Prosek - Book Review
Posted: Sun Nov 02, 2014 11:41 am
I had been vaguely aware of the author James Prosek after viewing his award winning film The Compleat Angler on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r2nRfnpWxw
I put out the feelers on this forum to see if anybody had any thoughts on him as an author, with glowing reports coming back I took the plunge and bought 3 of his books, all of which are, in my opinion, outstanding...
OK, so he's American and as such his works mainly focus around fly fishing and predator fishing, something that maybe not all our forum members can relate to, but at the end of the day it's still fishing.
Joe and Me is Mr Prosek's second book. It tells the tale of how a young James was taken under the wing of a local game warden and the subsequent chapters are basically tales of James and Joe on fishing and other rural adventures. Any one who had a fishing mentor will relate to this....
Early Love and Brook Trout is tales of James' quests to find native brook trout in the streams and ponds of Connecticut. What comes across in this book is the author's passion, not for large fish, but for those native ancient strains, you get the impression that he'd rather be marvelling at finger sized brook trout than catching huge, introduced trout. Again something that I think we 'enlightened' anglers can relate to.
Fly Fishing the 41st should actually be called Trout Hunting the 41st because there isn't a great deal of fly-fishing involved. Basically this is the story of an Austrian trout fanatic who travels around the 41st parallel (coincidentally as far as I can see) through countries such as Greece, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia on a mission to document the native trout of those regions with Prosek tagging along with his fly rod which he even uses on occasion. As an 'angling' book this isn't great, as a piece of travel writing with some insightful information on various strains of trout of the world, it is fantastic!
There was recent post on here where a member stated "isn't it great when you discover a new author?", well that's exactly what I have done and yes, it is great...
Scott
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r2nRfnpWxw
I put out the feelers on this forum to see if anybody had any thoughts on him as an author, with glowing reports coming back I took the plunge and bought 3 of his books, all of which are, in my opinion, outstanding...
OK, so he's American and as such his works mainly focus around fly fishing and predator fishing, something that maybe not all our forum members can relate to, but at the end of the day it's still fishing.
Joe and Me is Mr Prosek's second book. It tells the tale of how a young James was taken under the wing of a local game warden and the subsequent chapters are basically tales of James and Joe on fishing and other rural adventures. Any one who had a fishing mentor will relate to this....
Early Love and Brook Trout is tales of James' quests to find native brook trout in the streams and ponds of Connecticut. What comes across in this book is the author's passion, not for large fish, but for those native ancient strains, you get the impression that he'd rather be marvelling at finger sized brook trout than catching huge, introduced trout. Again something that I think we 'enlightened' anglers can relate to.
Fly Fishing the 41st should actually be called Trout Hunting the 41st because there isn't a great deal of fly-fishing involved. Basically this is the story of an Austrian trout fanatic who travels around the 41st parallel (coincidentally as far as I can see) through countries such as Greece, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia on a mission to document the native trout of those regions with Prosek tagging along with his fly rod which he even uses on occasion. As an 'angling' book this isn't great, as a piece of travel writing with some insightful information on various strains of trout of the world, it is fantastic!
There was recent post on here where a member stated "isn't it great when you discover a new author?", well that's exactly what I have done and yes, it is great...
Scott