Rivers of Memory

In these eight short essays, three of which have been previously published, Middleton singlemindedly demolishes the placid image of fishing with moody meditations and dark travelogues. A couple of these pieces read like creative writing class drills, and more than one is marked by florid sentiment. Nonetheless, Middleton makes direct contact with the pulse of existence that fishing provides many people. For the author of The Earth Is Enough , his beloved home waters in the southern Appalachians are the real sources of personal memory, and in re-fishing the waters of his hardscrabble youth, he shows that ``fishing is not an escape from life, but a deeper immersion into it.'' (Mar.)