's Best of 2001
When David James Duncan was growing up in suburban Portland, Oregon, he had no river to call his own, so he would routinely create one by flooding his mother's garden with a hose. He would then revel in his creation until he received the inevitable scolding. The poor kid couldn't help himself: "Running water ... felt as necessary to me as food, sleep, parents, and air," he explains. In time, he exchanged his nozzle for a fly rod and went in search of grander gardens, eventually developing an "interior coho compass" which he has traveled by ever since.

As any reader of The River Why knows, Duncan is a master of the art of writing about fishing--which is also to say life, since the two for him are indelibly linked. But these essays deal with far more than leaky waders and rising trout. Part memoir, part activist treatise, My Story As Told by Water is Duncan's love song to wild places and the creatures which inhabit them. The book's highlight is his powerfully convincing essay "A Prayer for the Salmon's Second Coming," in which he argues that saving salmon is crucial to both man and fish alike: "A 'modern Northwest' that cannot support salmon is unlikely to support 'modern Northwesterners' for long," he writes. In this elegant demand for the removal of four Snake River dams (out of 221 on the Snake/Columbia system), Duncan declares the wild salmon "a holiness, a divine gift," a role model rather than a resource: "Salmon are a light darting not just through water, but through the human mind and heart. Salmon help shield us from fear of death by showing us how to follow our course without fear, and how to give ourselves for the sake of things greater than ourselves."

He also ruminates on the true meanings of "place" and "home"; offers a fable on the 1872 Mining Act, "the most anachronistic and devastating piece of 'corporate welfare' in the world"; and details how Montanans rallied to prevent a giant mining company from extracting gold near the Blackfoot River, the setting of the Norman Maclean classic A River Runs Through It. All in all, My Story As Told by Water is a moving collection by an exquisite writer endowed with wit, compassion, and the rare ability to appeal to both emotion and reason in equal measures. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly
For a book that's cobbled together from essays that have appeared in such engagingly eclectic sources as the Patagonia clothing catalogue, Harper's, Gray's Sporting Journal and the New York Times, there's an engaging coherence to Duncan's 22 angry, heartbroken, yet hopeful and often quite comic nature essays. The author, whose 1983 debut novel, The River Why, became an enduring fly-fishing classic, holds the reader with the power of his unabashed passion for America's watersheds, particularly in the north and west. It's a lifelong appreciation that dates back to the days when, as a boy, he built his own wee rivers in the backyard. Sounding a clarion call to conservation activism, Duncan eloquently explains why clean, free-running water matters: just as we die without good water, so does the earth. Yet his unabashed polemic is nicely cushioned by rhapsody; he's the ranter as poet. "The War for Norman's River" (i.e., the Blackfoot River, central to Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It) is both a searing indictment of mining company predation and a celebration of citizens' power. In other chapters, he damns dams, lovingly eulogizes philosopher Henry Bugbee, acidly parodies the "anachronistic and devastating" 1872 Mining Act and, in a set of essays closing out the book, "Fishing the Inside Passage," makes the connection between the spirit of the land and the spirit of humankind. The sum of these many pieces is a vital whole. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In this enjoyable collection, refreshing as a glass of cold water on a scorching day, readers accompany Duncan as he discovers his inner "coho compass," share his joys and sorrows over knowing and losing an old friend, and experience a strange nightmare/allegory about the environmental impact of gold mining. Even if not apparent at first, the connection to fish and water runs through each essay, which reinforces Duncan's theme of our interconnectivity and dependence on the natural order. Duncan invites, includes, intrigues, and inculcates his readers so that they will never think of the Pacific Northwest, salmon, Montana, or Nevada gold mines as they did before. There is an especially convincing essay about the dams on the Snake River and the gains that would be netted by their removal, which reveals Duncan's logical, activist side. Duncan's previous fictional works, The River Why and The Brothers K, were both multiple award winners, and the same quality of writing is evident here. Essential for libraries in the West and strongly recommended for all public and academic environmental collections. Nancy Moeckel, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Book News, Inc.
Duncan, an award-winning author, blends his contemplative and activist voices to explore the rivers that touch his life and to defend the sacred cultures and fauna that living waters sustain. He dissects destructive environmental and industrial policies, looking at bankrupted fishing towns and the fight to save wild salmon, and ponders wading as pilgrimage, industrial creeks as blues tunes, and rivers as prayer wheels. Duncan is the author of two novels, a joint memoir, and a collection of stories. Both novels won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Review
"With this brilliantly said, funny, passionate, heartbroken, hopeful, and healing book David James Duncan moves into a very small class which includes himself, Norman Maclean, and Tom McGuane -- our most transcendent fly fishing writers."
-- William Kittredge

"David James Duncan is a profound and necessary American writer, a true inheritor of the passion, rage, and keen-eyed wisdom found in Thoreau and Whitman. His essays leap and bound through the natural world as dazzlingly as do his beloved trout, and as wildly. His fidelities are to beauty, to justice, and to the ways our actions and thoughts can honor a larger life; his ears and eyes travel equally toward insight and an untamable, exuberant humor. This book is an education, in the facts of cyanide mining's and dams' devastation, in the heart-truths by which existence goes on. If the power of a true-speaking voice can still make a difference, this book should change lives."
-- Jane Hirshfield, author, Nine Gates and Given Sugar, Given Salt

"David James Duncan is passionate, original, skillful, and funny as hell. His essays about the natural world are some of the best nonfiction around."
-- Ian Frazier

"My Story as Told by Water is the real McCoy, vivid and important, full of urgent news about living on earth. Often very funny, it might have been an outright rant but for the truths it tells. Anglers, water babies and river folk should read it immediately."
-- Thomas McGuane

"To call David James Duncan a 'nature writer' is to diminish Duncan and glorify the antiseptic brand of academic voyeur so often hung with the title. Duncan is less a writer of nature than a force of nature. He sees the natural world with a child's delighted eye, interprets it with a shaman's craggy wisdom, describes it with words that incandesce and leave you breathless. . . . For people who love wild rivers and what they represent, this is an essential book. For the corporations who shamelessly divert our wild rivers into their cash flow, this is a dangerous book."
-- James R. Babb, Editor, Gray's Sporting Journal

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In his own words, David James Duncan was "struck by a boyhood suspicion that rivers and mountains are myself turned inside out. I'd heard at church that the kingdom of heaven is within us and thought, Yeah, sure. But the first time I walked up a trout stream, fly rod in hand, I didn't feel I was 'outside' at all: I was traveling further and further in." An estimated three thousand river walks later comes My Story as Told by Water, in which Duncan braids his contemplative, activist, and rhapsodic voices together into an irresistibly distinctive whole, speaking with a power and urgency that will recharge our national appreciation of the vital connections between our water-filled bodies and this water-covered planet." "Here is a writer revealing captivating speculations on being born lost, on the discovery of water, on wading as pilgrimage, coho as interior compass, and industrial creeks as blues tunes. Here are rivers perceived as prayer wheels, dying birds as prophets, salmon as life-givers, brown trout as role models, wilderness as our true home, wonder as true ownership, and justice as biologically and spiritually inescapable."--BOOK JACKET.

SYNOPSIS

Duncan, an award-winning author, blends his contemplative and activist voices to explore the rivers that touch his life and to defend the sacred cultures and fauna that living waters sustain. He dissects destructive environmental and industrial policies, looking at bankrupted fishing towns and the fight to save wild salmon, and ponders wading as pilgrimage, industrial creeks as blues tunes, and rivers as prayer wheels. Duncan is the author of two novels, a joint memoir, and a collection of stories. Both novels won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

FROM THE CRITICS

Ian Frazier

Original, skillful, and funny as hell.

Thomas McGuane

My Story as told by Water is the real McCoy, vivid and important, full of urgent news about living on earth.

Library Journal