Fly fishing through the midlife crisis

Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis is part sporting autobiography and part guidebook to life's middle passage. It is filled with the author's love for fly fishing - "this disciplined, beautiful and unessential activity" - and informed by his years as a journalistic observer of American society and politics. Howell Raines's own experience of the years between forty and fifty will resonate for countless other men who face aging, divorce, new romances, the growth of children and the deaths of friends, mentors and relatives. Raines writes of these transitions with passion and wry humor. "Hear me, my brothers," he says. "Anything is possible in the life of a man if he lives long enough. Even adulthood." There are lessons here for younger men about the overblown fears of midlife, for women who want a unique glimpse into the male psyche, for middle-aged men who are more at home in the out-of doors than in men's movement seminars. The author turns to a lifelong passion for fishing as the central metaphor of his book. "I was born in the heart of Dixie and raised in the Redneck Way of Fishing," Raines writes in an affectionate evocation of an Alabama boyhood peopled by larger-than-life o