Mark Kurlansky

A fascinating book about a fish and man's involvement with what was once one of the world's most plentiful foodstuffs. The book shows us what we can lose when we treat the environment so badly.

Flourishing in just about every climate and culture around the world, onions have provided the essential basis not only for sautés, stews, and sauces, but for medicines, metaphors, and folklore. Now they're Kurlansky's most flavorful infatuation yet as he sets out to explore how and why the crop reigns from Italy to India and everywhere in between.

Kurlansky begins with the science and history of the only sulfuric acid-spewing plant, then digs through its twenty varieties and the cultures built around them. Entering the kitchen, Kurlansky celebrates the raw, roasted, creamed, marinated, and pickled. Includes a recipe section featuring more than one hundred dishes from around the world.

Fly fishing, historian Mark Kurlansky has found, is a battle of wits, fly fisher vs. fish - and the fly fisher does not always (or often) win. The targets are highly intelligent, wily, strong, and athletic animals. The allure, Kurlansky learns, is that fly fishing makes catching a fish as difficult as possible. There is an art, too, in the crafting of flies. Beautiful and intricate, some are made with more than two dozen pieces of feather and fur from a wide range of animals.

The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing marries Kurlansky's signature wide-ranging reach with a subject that has captivated him for a lifetime - combining history, craft, and personal memoir to show readers, devotees of the sport or not, the necessity of experiencing nature's balm first-hand.