My Secret Fishing Life

Within the pond of those who write about fly-fishing, Lyons is one of the bigger fish. He has authored 16 titles (In Praise of Wild Trout, etc.) on the evidently inexhaustible subject and has published others' books on the art and mystique of fly-fishing. This is his most introspective book yet: ""I have tried to find more of what my professional life has amounted to than ever before and more of my personal life."" That he had a personal life at all is amazing given that, for 13 years, he was a full-time editor at Crown, taught five courses at Hunter College (where colleagues looked askance at his fishing articles and books, unable to see what such low-brow pursuits had to do with his professorship), ghostwrote four books and continued with his own writing--and had four children. He later started a book-packaging firm, Lyons & Burford, which became an independent house; now he heads Lyons Press. Even so, Lyons found time to go fishing, and there are plenty of fish tales here, spiced with references to Hesse, Twain, Melville, Max Planck, Byron and others. Lyons succeeds at what he sets out to do: show how the various loves and obsessions of a life interlock. Fly fishers and publishing folk alike will welcome the effort. In a marvelous passage, Lyons describes his discovery of the voice with which he first wrote about fishing, as opposed to the one he employed as an English professor: the new voice was ""earthy, nimble, wry, full of wit and worms and celebration."" He's still got it. (Apr.)