Crosscurrents: A Fly Fisher's Progress.

"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