Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #568664 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Amazon.com
"Oh boy. Another collection of navel-gazing essays from a baby boomer who got hold of a fly rod and a word processor and thought Eureka, I've found myself. And now wants to share." Any writer who can open a volume of, well, navel-gazing essays that self-effacingly has probably done some useful gazing, might actually have something worth saying, and has most likely manufactured a pretty good way of saying it. Fly-fishing is less avocation for James Babb, the editor of Gray's Sporting Journal, than a personal life choice. Born in the back of an ambulance in the parking lot of a Tennessee barbecue joint, he eventually resettled in New England. Through odd job after odd job, he found his equilibrium on the streams. When he wasn't out fly-fishing, he was thinking about it--and writing about it with unforced quirkiness and insight. In time, he built his own cabin in Maine with a trout pond to go with it. Why Maine? "I often say that I moved to Maine," he writes, "for the brook trout and Thoreau's wild North Woods and the joys of living in an inbred rural community where none of the cousins are mine." In a voice that's legitimately funny, magnetic, and unique, Babb has his say on just about everything from waders to wading staffs, British literature to knives and forks, which makes it a reader's adventure and an angler's catch. --Jeff Silverman

From Library Journal
Every few years one wonders if the fountain of talented essayists on fly-fishing is running dry. Then someone like Babb (editor of Gray's Sporting Journal since 1997) comes along. In this outstanding first book, his writing is literary and without pretense, mixing Thoreau and Poe with Dilbert and Zane Grey. His essays echo the work of well-known fly-fishing author John Gierach (Standing in a River Waving a Stick, LJ 2/1/99). Both are fine writers with wonderfully wry senses of humor to complement their talent for character development, observation, and description. A native of Tennessee now living in Maine, Babb writes of his Southern upbringing, setting down roots in the Maine woods, and his travels to exotic fly-fishing destinations. Included among these is a wonderful tale in which he sings 1960s television show theme songs on a guided trip down an unfished Canadian river. The best fly-fishing book of the year; for all libraries.
-Jeff Grossman, Milwaukee Area Technical Coll. Lib., Oak Creek, WI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A fireside collection of fly-fishing pieces, touched withbut not drowned infolksy wisdom and whimsy, from Gray's Sporting Journal editor and columnist Babb. These short essays are divided into two groups: those inspired by Babb's youth in, and return visits to, East Tennessee, and those that find him fishing here and there around the world, mostly in his current home state of Maine. A fly-fishing fool, Babb tries to make much of the clash between his roots, where the inhabitants have been characterized as ``crude, kindly, ignorant, and murderous,'' and the rarefied history of East Coast fly-fishing. But his pose as a homeboy from the Land of Goober often grates, as too many years in Massachusetts and Maine have spiffed up his persona. Not that he doesn't hit upon some heavy truths in fishingwe found that the best signs of all said DANGER. KEEP OUT. NO TRESPASSING''and in lifethe most chilling words you can hear south of Mason and Dixon's line: `Whut're yew lookin' at?''' By the time he gets to the Maine pieces, Babb has lost his faux twang and the stories feel shorn, immediate, and tactile. There is a terrific brief catalog of months describing his first year in Maine and much fond quoting of Thoreau's rhapsodies on the state. And there are the simple joys of the fly fisherman: a trip to hell in the far north country, searching for bamboo rods in yard sales, watching stunned as a false albacore makes his reel melt down. His humor, though, needs help. It can be enjoyably goofy (``I don't see anything at all eccentric about bass-bugging with a Spey rod,'' yet often plain stupid (``Soon we'll see Mick Jagger pimping for denture adhesives, a laxative commercial backed by `I Can't Get No Satisfaction'''). But there are pleasures ample enough here, conveyed with an infectious love of the sport. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Nicely done
Perhaps my title is insufficient. The progress is more or less identical to what any reasonable human being would want in the late 20th and early 21'st century.

A man of insight, regrets, decent moral grounding and capable of facing the difficulties of the realities of ecology (a/k/a Cranes and Rainbow trout) James Babb has molded a life worth living. Would that we were all so talented and perceptive. A biography more than a fish story is to be had here.

more than fish
Babb is one hell of a writer, and Crosscurrents is about more than just fish and antique split bamboo rods. It's about one man's spiritual journey from his boyhood home in the hills of East Tennessee to the lobsterman's life in the cold North Atlantic, to the hills of Maine, where he now resides. Plenty of adventures along the way, unforgettable characters, cultural observations, literary and historical allusions, and some really fine writing. I've never thrown a dry fly in my life, but I loved it, anyway. Bravo, Mr. James Babb!