For a book that's cobbled together from essays that have appeared in such engagingly eclectic sources as the Patagonia clothing catalogue, Harper's, Gray's Sporting Journal
and the New York Times, there's an engaging coherence to Duncan's 22 angry, heartbroken, yet hopeful and often quite comic nature essays. The author, whose 1983 debut novel, The River Why,
became an enduring fly-fishing classic, holds the reader with the power of his unabashed passion for America's watersheds, particularly in the north and west. It's a lifelong appreciation that dates back to the days when, as a boy, he built his own wee rivers in the backyard. Sounding a clarion call to conservation activism, Duncan eloquently explains why clean, free-running water matters: just as we die without good water, so does the earth. Yet his unabashed polemic is nicely cushioned by rhapsody; he's the ranter as poet. "The War for Norman's River" (i.e., the Blackfoot River, central to Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It) is both a searing indictment of mining company predation and a celebration of citizens' power. In other chapters, he damns dams, lovingly eulogizes philosopher Henry Bugbee, acidly parodies the "anachronistic and devastating" 1872 Mining Act and, in a set of essays closing out the book, "Fishing the Inside Passage," makes the connection between the spirit of the land and the spirit of humankind. The sum of these many pieces is a vital whole. (July)
