A shout out to Kenneth Kidd for giving me a copy of this book of short stories for Christmas. Ken and his newspaper cronies regularly fish together. Some of them, including Kidd, have contributed to this book. I am not a fisherman. Never liked it. But I can appreciate what fishing means to the psyche in this intolerably fast and noisy modern life. Fishing ties to together man and nature, fathers with sons, grown men with their ideas of what it means to be a grown man, citizens with their country, and comedy with tragedy. I felt so many of these emotions stream through the pages of stories which included work from Americans Annie Proulx and Thomas McGuane and well-known Canadians such as the David Adams Richards and Marni Jackson, a neighbour and family friend. Among the more personally painful stories for me to read was the memoir of editor Jake MacDonald of his fishing trips with the late Paul Quarrington, accomplished writer and folk musician. Quarrington and his family were customers of mine. Not surprisingly there are a lot of Scots in these pages and salmon fishing in the Miramichi Valley of northern New Brunswick. Richards' story Reflections From the Pools ties together sea, land and sky in a most poetic fashion. And time. And generations. I highly recommend these stories not only to sportsmen, but also to lovers of the wilderness, the folly of men, and the mystical pull of the competition between men and fish. (Since this review was written, my landlord and friend Ken Kidd passed away while on vacation in Africa. RIP. Our acquaintance was too brief.) ( )