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A Jerk on One End: Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman (Library of Contemporary Thought), by Robert Hughes
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"In some ways it's a ridiculous human passion," renowned author and art critic Robert Hughes confesses of his lifelong devotion to fishing. But it is a powerful, abiding passion nonetheless, one that Hughes shares with presidents and paupers, philosophers and truants, mystics and macho deep-sea warriors. Author of the acclaimed The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding, The Culture of Complaint, and American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, Hughes now brings his wit, insight, critical eye, and incomparable genius for narrative to bear on the pastime he loves best.
Hughes acknowledges that if he were to amortize the market value of the fish he catches in a year against the expense of catching them, he'd be shelling out about $55 a pound on bluefish alone. But clearly he's not in it for the money. In A Jerk on One End, Hughes traces his love of fishing back to his earliest boyhood on Sydney Harbor, Australia, and recounts the high and low points of his career with rod and reel--the first surge of triumph when he snagged a six-pound bonito, the shame of having his father catch him trout-fishing with live bait (the most perfidious failing in the eyes of every fly-fisher), hair-raising shark tales he picked up on the Sydney waterfront.
Here too is a history of fishing going back to classical antiquity, along with meditations on the art and philosophy of fishing and deep draughts of the finest fishing writing through the ages. Hughes gazes long and hard into the shining eyes of his prey and captures the essence of each noble species in brilliant verbal portraits--the delicate striped bass, most amenable to cooking and most susceptible to urban pollutants; the infinitely treacherous tarpon; the fastidious, elusive trout; the giant bluefin tuna, which holds the dubious honor of being the most expensive and sought after animal on earth. And in one unforgettable passage, he adopts the fish's point of view and forces us to imagine the horror of being hooked and reeled into an alien element.
Fishing, Hughes asserts, taught him patience as a boy and reverence for nature as man. In the concluding pages of this splendid book, he draws on this reverence to make a powerfully reasoned plea for the ecology of the sea. Mixing memoir, history, adventure, folklore, and stunning descriptions of the fathomless mysteries of the deep, Robert Hughes has written an absolutely magnificent volume. A Jerk on One End is a superb piece of prose and a profound meditation on the beauty, the excitement, and the peerless pleasures of fishing--and of life.
- Sales Rank: #1215350 in Books
- Published on: 1999-10
- Released on: 1999-10-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.27" h x .58" w x 5.30" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 144 pages
Amazon.com Review
Robert Hughes's memoir of the fishing life begins like a lazy day on the water. A few observations on the sport's history, a look at the literature, even some comical reminiscences about trying to harpoon tuna and battle tarpon. But then Hughes returns to the piers of his native Sydney. It is there that the boy who would turn into the preeminent art critic of his generation began educating his eyes: "To fish at all, even on a humble level," he writes, "you must notice things: the movement of the water and its patterns, the rocks, the seaweed.... Time on the pier taught me to concentrate on the visual, for fishing is intensely visual, even--perhaps especially--when nothing is happening. It is easy to look, but learning to see is a more gradual business, and it sneaks up on you unconsciously, by stealth."
Hughes has made seeing his life's pursuit, and despite claims of mediocrity in angling, his grasp of the larger picture is clear. In this slim volume's concluding essay, "Troubled Waters," he decries the ravages of commercial fishing, reasserts our need to respect creatures unlike ourselves, and provides an emphatic reminder that fishing's real joys are in the catching--not the killing. "We have no moral right to preserve only cuddly tourist attractions like the koala," he stresses. "Wildness, otherness, and dread, embodied in living creatures, also have their claims." --Jeff Silverman
From Booklist
Art critic Hughes (The Shock of the New [1981], American Visions [1997]) has been an avid fisher ever since, when he was 11, his father taught him fly-fishing and sportsmanship. Those early experiences occupy the most indelible pages of an essay that genially rambles between personal experience, history, and literary reportage--the last of which looms large because so many other good writers enjoyed angling and successfully expatiated on it (the third most reprinted book in English is Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler). Since there are two kinds of fishing, Hughes devotes a chapter to each. For fishing ignoramuses, learning that western writer Zane Grey is also a legendary oceanic fisher is just one of the revelations in "Salt Water," and how angling became a gentleman's sport is but one absorbing topic in "Fresh Water." The sobering wrap-up chapter, "Troubled Water," on overfishing and water pollution, may turn many readers to Carl Safina's Song for the Blue Ocean (1997), which Hughes strongly recommends. A good catch of a book. Ray Olson
From Kirkus Reviews
An unlikely match of subject, author, and series (this is a volume in the Library of Contemporary Thought) puts art critic and historian Hughes (American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, 1997, etc.) at the other end of a fishing pole. Hughes brings the same mixture of insight, self-deprecating whimsy, and caustic wit to the subject of angling that he has put to good use in art criticism and polemics. During his Australian boyhood, he was an avid fisherman, and he has retained that enthusiasm for ``a good deal of my life. . . not with enough dedication to qualify as ``expert,'' however you might define that.'' But his dedication to fishing has enriched his inner life in ways that are unexpectedly reflected in his ``day job'': like novelist Craig Nova (see page 1205), Hughes has found fishing ``an education in seeing and discriminating,'' in learning to read the subtleties of water in motion and natural phenomena in the unending search for clues to where the fish are biting. More than that, however, A Jerk on One End is a discerning and clever history of the cultural and class implications of fishing, followed by a passionate and convincing, if brief, survey of the dreadful ecological effects of industrial fishing as practiced around the world today. Hughes is wonderfully candid about the seeming contradictions in the ethics of his sport, so much so that his argument with the factory fishing mavens is made that much more compelling. A thoughtful and witty little volume whose readership should extend beyond the fly-fishing purist. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Very Short, Very Smart, Very Funny.........
By A Customer
As an artist, I've found inspiration time and again in Robert Hughes'books and the American Visions series. As a third-generation Floridian growing up on the Hillsborough River, I instinctively came by an appreciation of both the mystique of the water and the way fishing linked me to it. As a mostly-vegetarian who still succumbs to seafood, I feel some sense of guilt and sadness for the realities of the commercial fishing industry. This is a poignant and amusing little book, and a clarion call to those who don't give much thought to where their salmon filet came from. Robert Hughes is an inspired writer; this book demonstrates how his holistic take on cultural history translates into wonderful insights in seemingly disparate fields. This is a book I'll re-read every summer!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
No jerk on the end of the pen
By R. J MOSS
Robert Hughes might rightly self-nominate as a mediocre fisherman. This has never applied to his writing. Herein is brace of reflections, which,perhaps surprisingly, seams with his sensitive, morally driven, art-criticism. The art of trout fishing was taught him by his father whose injunction to play fair and catch and feed your and yourself only, informs Hughes's abhorrence of the ravaging of world fish stocks in the final chapter. Fishing with his father taught him the craft of handling time, to subvert impatience and its fast track from desire to satisfaction. You move at fish tempo. On the trout trail you learn to observe detail in nature; the near abstract perfection of streams and so on. And then the reward of savoring their deep pinkish flesh - delicious and sacramental from its diet of crayfish. He pauses on the evolution of fishing literature, attitudes to it, the fashions for different breeds, the Christian church's symbolic embrace of its image, the snobbery of the C18th English gentry during the transforming period of the Industrial Revolution and the commensurate rise of fishing as a sport. Hughes saves his lathering best for the greed of commercial fishing and our immunity to the destruction of our oceans, primed as we are, at school with images of Nature as a land-based zoo of the warm-blooded, air breathers. He rails against the teaching of his Christian school masters, the Genesis account of God setting man in dominion over the earth and its creatures - a destructive myth. Moderation and temperance are Hughes's rejoinders. This slim volume is no less important than his insights about the visual arts. Funny and informative and about an hour of liesurely reading while floating in your 'tinny', with one eye on the end of your line.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
very appealing
By Michael L. Landau
Here is a great little book worth reading. Start with a terrific title and follow with a witty, intelligent book in which there are no wasted words and which does not ever seem "interminable" and you've got a great combination. Highly recommended for the fisherman and anyone else in your family.
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