Product Description

Roderick L. Haig-Brown is one of the world's most beloved fly-fishing writers. His classic books bring together exquisite prose, the full romance and beauty of fishing, and much solid angling advice. Here, for the first time in one volume, are his popular seasons books: Fisherman's Spring, Fisherman's Summer, Fisherman's Fall, and Fisherman's Winter. They chronicle a fisherman's year, from the brightening days of spring through a loving portrait of the author's home rivers in British Columbia during the summer, on into the excitement of fall fishing, to a winter away from his Campbell River, to fish the great rivers of Argentina and Chile. As Verlyn Klinkenborg has said, "It think it forms some sort of watershed experience in every angler's reading when he comes upon Roderick Haig-Brown for the first time." And so it does. The Seasons of a Fisherman is an excellent place to start. (20000901)

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #177434 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 560 pages

Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
It's fitting that someone so well-rounded as Roderick Haig-Brown--public administrator and private writer, naturalist and humane bureaucrat--would be best remembered for a book called Seasons of a Fisherman. Collecting his four seasonal angling memoirs written between 1951 and 1964, Seasons easily marries the practical and the philosophical, establishing Haig-Brown as arguably the finest chronicler of a pastime that has attracted literary aspirants like trout to a well-tied lure.

From Amazon.com
Logger, trapper, guide, magistrate, army officer, radio broadcaster, conservationist, and university chancellor, Roderick L. Haig-Brown, the multitalented Renaissance man of North American angling, considered himself first and foremost a writer. Given the overall quality, range, depth, and grace of The Seasons of a Fisherman, it would be awfully hard to argue. This marvelous volume, which collects four of his best-loved classics between one set of covers for the first time, should elegantly introduce Haig-Brown, who died in 1976, to a new generation of outdoors enthusiasts as it reintroduces him to his old angling friends.

Originally written in the early '50s, the four books wade into an angler's summer, winter, spring, and fall, and while each muses over what a particular season requires of the fisherman, none is just about fishing; Haig-Brown never limited himself. These books are about his beloved British Columbia, the environment as a whole, its repetitive rhythms, and the angler's place in it. They are about fishing stories; the traditions of fly-fishing; and how to catch fish, tie flies, and observe the natural world. Fishing, in Haig-Brown's cosmos, was more than just the pursuit of fish: it was the full, wide-ranging engagement of the mind and the senses.

Listen to the litheness of his prose from "Fisherman's Spring," the first of the four sections, as he ponders the worthiness of the endeavor:

It is ... something more than a sport. It is an intimate exploration of a part of the world hidden from the eyes and minds of ordinary people. It is a way of thinking and doing, a way of reviving the mind and body, that men have been following with growing intensity for hundreds of years.

This is just a taste of what "Seasons" overflows with, as is this admission--is there an angler who can't share it?--from "Summer": "I am beginning to find it very salutary to remember just how much 'happening right,' if not downright luck, there has been in nearly all my little triumphs." As a book, Seasons is a big enough triumph to become a dog-eared cornerstone of your fly-fishing library. --Jeff Silverman

From Library Journal
With spring within sight, fly fishers are beginning to inspect their gear carefully, feeling their lines for nicks and weak spots, testing hook sharpness, and checking waders for holes, all in anticipation of that first magic day out. Haig-Brown has long been a favorite read among anglers, and this volume combines his four standard volumes, Fisherman's Spring (1951), Fisherman's Summer (1959), Fisherman's Fall (1964), and Fisherman's Winter (1954), into a single, beautiful hardcover. Haig-Brown's writings are always in season.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.