Anonymous:

This is an honest and generous book. The author is a genuine enthusiast, and a capable, sober writer. I wish all fishing books were written with the regard Tim shows for his readers. Hell, I wish more novels were written with this sort of precision and care!

At any rate, if you’re a freshwater fishing enthusiast, and you’ve dabbled with trout or with river or stream fishing, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

As Tim points out, the smallmouth inhabits a much wider range than trout and salmon, but offers many of the same challenges and joys — particularly to us folks here in the plains. With the encouragement and guidance of this book, I have found, in my home state of Illinois, a tremendous variety of smallmouth streams just an hour or two away from Chicago. Clear, swift running, gravel bottom streams, with picky, tough, green-gold fish who will respond if you know what you’re doing. Of course they giggle like children if you don’t …

In a way, and I believe Tim would back me on this, the Smallmouth is the supreme midwestern fish, and represents what our region once had to offer — and what is (surprisingly and luckily) still ours to protect and glorify. It can’t be just coincidence that my favorite Smallmouth stream runs by a post-card pretty American legion baseball field — can it?

And when I first found this stream, and a couple local kids dunking worms told me it only had suckers and catfish in it… well, when I took a pretty bass out of the next pool, I felt like I’d rode into town and rode out with the homecoming queen riding shotgun.

Now if that aint life in These United States, what is?

Thanks Tim
Rating: 5 / 5