Publishers Weekly
★ 07/06/2020
Sportswriter Burke (Saban: The Making of a Coach) takes a fascinating deep-dive look into the world of tarpon fishing and the town famous for it. In the more than 40 years since Tom Evans, a New York City stockbroker, first caught a world-record fish in Homosassa, Fla., in 1977, he has returned to the area and landed six more record tarpons in the surrounding waters. His success made this small town the hub of saltwater fly-fishing in the 1970s and ’80s, and attracted professional anglers (Stu Apte, Lefty Kreh, Billy Pate, Ted Williams) as well as fishing enthusiasts including writers Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane and landscape painter Russell Chatham. Burke wonderfully captures their stories as well as those of their unsung guides, detailing the alliances and rivalries (local outfitters disliked the growing number of guides coming up from the Keys; and Keys outfitters felt “the manner in which fished the place was rather primitive”). Burke’s writing is vivid and lyrical, as when he describes how “the roots of the mangroves... gripped the river bottom like the fingers of witches.” Told with an angler’s eye for detail, even the glossaries of fishing terminology and fly-fishing techniques will engage readers (a fish is icicled when it “is totally spent from a fight and is motionless in the water, its tail suspended over its head”). Fly-fishing fans will be hooked. (Sept.)
Booklist
Burke paints a vivid picture of the clear water and white sands that madeHomosassa such a nexus of world fishing record holders, drawing in the history of the place, thetarpon, the sport of fly-fishing, and the famous anglers who name their names over a century...This tarpon chroniclewill appeal to all anglers and everyone fascinated by marine life.
David DiBenedetto
Finally, a book about tarpon and the obsessed anglers who pursue them that's as spirited and majestic as the fish themselves. Through extensive reporting and writing that shimmers like a Florida flat, Burke puts the reader in the boat, on the fly rod, and at the marina bar with the legends of the fishery. You’ll be hooked from the first sentence.
Garden & Gun
"Flashy, brawny, and electrifying, just like the tarpon itself. The angling stories are epic—imagine poling into a daisy chain of two thousand fish—but Burke keeps equal focus on the human element: the rivalries, foibles, and, in some cases, the Ahab-esque pathologies of the anglers themselves."
Randy Wayne White
"Monte Burke is a superb researcher with an ear for lyricism that does not degrade into poetic gobbledygook. The story he weaves makes Lords of the Fly the most compelling non-fiction book I’ve read in years."
Michael Keaton
"I distinctly remember the first tarpon I hooked. After about a half-dozen leaps that would leave an audience at Sea World slack-jawed, I looked up at the end of my fly rod bent against the horizon and thought: 'Good God, I've got a dinosaur on a stick!' A tarpon is one of the greatest creatures in the sea. Lords of the Fly gets to the heart of why. You will love this book.
James W. Hall
"In Monte Burke’s Lords of the Fly we are treated to an exquisitely detailed portrait of tarpon, its mysterious habits, its place in history, in art, in Biblical lore. But it is the fish’s extraordinary fusion of power and speed and its prehistoric majesty and its ferocious fight that attracted a flamboyant cast of characters who shared the obsessive drive to land a world record tarpon or simply to have one of those high-flying monsters on the end of their fly line. In witty and muscular prose, Burke ties together these disparate elements as neatly and beguilingly as a well-crafted tarpon fly."
The Wall Street Journal - Richard Adams Carey
"What Susan Orlean accomplished for the strange, hermetic world of orchid hunting in her 1998 classic, The Orchid Thief, Monte Burke does for another strange, hermetic world in his wonderful Lords of the Fly. A lush, panoramic book."
Carl Hiaasen
"This is a story of the obsessed, unhinged, and often brilliant dreamers who chase giant tarpon—a primeval fish with breathtaking glamour and ungodly strength. The thrill of hooking one on a fly rod is impossible to exaggerate, so you can believe every word of Monte Burke’s funny, wistful, wonderful book. He’s clearly as sick as the rest of us."
Kirkus Reviews
2020-07-08
A fascinating look at the narrow but wild world of tarpon fishing.
Forbes and Garden & Gun contributing editor Burke indulges in his boundless enthusiasm for fishing, showing how storytelling is an important part of the fishing experience. “In angling, as in life,” writes the author, “it is the ones that get away that haunt our dreams, that push us over the brink into a lustful madness. And Homosassa [Florida] was the first place in these anglers’ lives where, hot damn, those dreams just might come true.” In Sowbelly (2005), Burke chronicled the search for a record largemouth bass. Here, he focuses on the less-known arena of tarpon fishing, discussing its most prominent practitioners as well as the extraordinary fish itself, a behemoth that can weigh more than 250 pounds and live to be 80. The book is also about a specific time and place—late-1970s to early-1980s Homosassa—and the colorful fishing culture that thrived within it. Burke brings readers to this infamous hot spot, where the biggest names in fly-fishing—including baseball star Ted Williams and a cadre of other tough characters—would converge to try and out-angle each other. But it wasn’t only about the purity of fishing. “The egos involved made the atmosphere electric,” writes the author. “The difficulty of the quest made it legitimate. And the drugs and the women that were swept in with the tide made it all veer out of control.” By the mid-1990s, the Homosassa tarpon craze began to peter out. Climate-unfriendly governance in Florida led to an ecological crisis that helped drive the tarpon from Florida’s coastal waters. Burke constructs the rise and fall of this unique fishing tale with impressive narrative control and an obvious reverence for its vivid characters.
Ably captures the swagger, attitudes, and angling derring-do of a golden age of fishing history.
