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| | | Location: Home » Wildlife Conservation » Biographies & Memoirs » My Story as Told by Water: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish-Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, from Living Rivers, in the Age of the Industrial Dark | |
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| My Story as Told by Water: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish-Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, from Living Rivers, in the Age of the Industrial Dark | 
| Author: David James Duncan
Publisher: Sierra Club Books
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy Used: $7.29
You Save: $9.66 (57%)
New (18) from $9.56
Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 86198
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 1578050839
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9781578050833
ASIN: 1578050839
Publication Date: August 5, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Inventory subject to prior sale. Used items have varying degrees of wear, highlighting, etc. and may not include supplements such as infotrac or other web access codes. Expedited orders cannot be sent to PO Box. Sorry, not able to ship to APO, FPO, Alaska, and Hawaii.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com'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
Product Description
In this remarkable collection of essays, acclaimed author David James Duncan braids his contemplative, rhapsodic, and activist voices together into a potently distinctive whole, speaking with power and urgency about the vital connections between our water-filled bodies and this water-covered planet. All twenty-two pieces in this collection swirl and eddy around his early-forged bond with the rivers of the Pacific Northwest and their endangered native salmon. With a bracing blend of story, science, and comedy, Duncan relates mystical, life-changing adventures; draws incisive portraits of the humans and wild creatures who shaped his destiny; rips the corporate greed and political folly that have brought whole ecosystems to ruin; and meditates on the spiritual and practical necessity of acknowledging our dependence on water in its primal state.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Duncan leaves me speachless... February 26, 2006
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The conflicted fiction and non-fiction writer delivers a masterpiece. Thank you David.
 Self-indulgent nonsense August 12, 2005
7 out of 18 found this review helpful
Duncan is a masterful wordsmith; this no one can reasonably dispute. But over the years, he has become so full of himself, so pretentious and self-important, that to me he is almost unreadable.
I give the book two stars because of a little bit of excellent fly fishing content, and because of Duncan's undeniable writing ability. But before you buy it, you should read Donald Miller's hilarious send-up of Duncan (whom he labels Trendy Writer) in "Blue Like Jazz." Don Miller -- now there's a guy who has something significant to say on metaphysical themes. Duncan is merely showing off; Khwaja Khadir indeed!
 Stereotypical, obvious, pompus April 3, 2004
7 out of 33 found this review helpful
Duncan's textbook rants are so predictable I found myself mouthing the next sentence before I read it. As someone who's work and life is submerged in environmental, water use, and preservation issues I find this type of stereotypical ranting more detrimental to the issues that concern me than most G.W. policies. Duncan preaches to the choir, but his preaching is so over the top it is a turn-off. While I agree with virtually every theme and policy he promotes, his pompus diatribes push me in the other direction. If this book were written 40 years ago it might strike a radical tone and inspire action. In these times it is merely a rehash of the new-age mumbo-jumbo that is so easy for the opposition to tear down. This book will apeal to two audiences: new-age sheep, and right-wingers looking to bash environmentalists. The rest will find it harder to wade through than Columbia.
Henry Bugbee March 6, 2004
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
For those who are interested in the life and teaching of Henry Bugbee, Duncan's account of Henry's last days makes this book worth reading.
 My Story As Told By Water November 6, 2003
1 out of 14 found this review helpful
My Story As Told By Water by David James Duncan was a confusing and overly political way to express the author's love for water. HIs diliverey is good, but he should keep in mind that his readers are reading for entertainment, not to hear about our government's poor decisions.
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