Book Review: Casting a Spell
In Casting a Spell, George Black introduces readers to rapt artisans and the ultimate talismans of their uncompromising fascination: handmade bamboo fly rods. But this narrative is more than a story of obscure objects of desire. It opens a new vista onto a century and a half of modern American cultural history. With bold strokes and deft touches, Black explains how the ingenuity of craftsmen created a singular implement of leisure–and how geopolitics, economics, technology, and outrageous twists of fortune have all come to focus on the exquisitely crafted bamboo rod. We discover that the pastime of fly-fishing intersects with a mind-boggling variety of cultural trends, including conspicuous consumption, environmentalism, industrialization, and even cold war diplomacy.
Reviews:
In this beautifully crafted, utterly engaging work, Black wraps his own personal journey through the contemporary world of bamboo fly rod making in a sweeping, meticulous telling of the history of American fly-fishing. With admirable dexterity, he manages to make the story a metaphor for a great deal of how American social and commercial culture has evolved over the past 150 years. Black indelibly etches a story of peerless craftsmen laboring toward perfection, sparring all the while with corporate interest, fickle customers and the inevitable diminishing of their own inspiration.
From Publishers Weekly Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Black celebrates the bamboo fly rod, finding in this special piece of fishing tackle a metaphor for an offshoot of the American dream: what he calls the "pursuit of perfection" in craftsmanship. The text combines a history of bamboo rod development–from -nineteenth-century craftsmen through such recent rod makers as Hoagy Carmichael Jr.–with a broader narrative in which bamboo craftsmanship becomes part of a larger story involving the cold war, the growth of outdoor retailing companies (Abercrombie and Fitch, Orvis, L. L. Bean), and the movement of the tackle-manufacturing industry from the U.S. to overseas (rod bamboo, it turns out, is only available in China). John Rowen
From Booklist Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
George Black did not pick up a fly rod till after his fortieth birthday–and he has seldom willingly put one down since. He was born in the small Scottish mining town of Cowdenbeath and was educated at Oxford University. Black is the author of four other books, including The Trout Pool Paradox: The American Lives of Three Rivers.
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