LAST PLANE FROM LONDON

Top American roving foreign correspondent Aleksandr Levene, employed by the Los Angeles Times, and based in London, tells the story in his own words. It could be fantasy. But maybe not. It could have happened. It could happen yet. London has been devastated. England has been devastated. The class struggle has become a reality, along with a lot of other struggles, as various armed factions fight to gain supremacy. An American plane is supposedly going to land at Heathrow, to rescue the few American survivors who remained on to serve their country in one capacity or another. The earlier plane that had been sent had been shot down.

Departure is from the US Embassy. Aleksandr, unlike the American remnants who have taken shelter there, has been living on his own, in an apartment not far away. He prefers to take his chances as an independent, continuing to do his job as a reporter, rather than live in the confined conditions of the Embassy, usually under siege from one faction or another. Now he is preparing to leave. He carries an orange blood-stained rucksack, six cans of beef burgers and two cans of sardines, confiscated from a pair of marauders who came calling, and whom he'd shot with his Colt .45.

Moving on toward the embassy, he is confronted by two men, one of whom is carrying a shotgun. Aleksandr sends them on their way, with a shot each, and confiscates the shotgun, a Purdy, which he discovers is unloaded. Nor do they have any cartridges. He reaches the embassy, and in due course the convoy moves off to the airport, where they assume a defensive position, and wait, hopefully, for the plane that is to rescue them. Soon they come under attack, from men on horseback. As it turns out, the leader of this group of attackers is Aleksandr's brother-in-law, eager to move upward from his low social origins. Aleksandr explains how this has come about, how he had married the sister of this man, naive as he was at the time, under the mistaken belief that there was something holy about the working classes.

BLACK DAWN OVER LONDONSTAN

John Shepherd, telling the story in his own words, has been brought in to prevent a British equivalent of Nine Eleven. Such an attack, we have been assured, is inevitable; only when, and where, is in doubt.

John, formerly of the Foreign Office, Arab speaking, an expert on Arab/Muslim affairs, is equally competent in computer technology and usage. He considers where and how to begin; London plays host to virtually every representative and shade of opinion in the Arab/Muslim world. Some, like al Quaida , definitely not Western-friendly, picked London as its European headquarters, since it was seen as an easy place in which to function. German intelligence dubbed it “Londonstan.” British Intelligence agrees. So does the Foreign Office. Was it the “Open Society,” displaying its liberalism, or an attempt to placate those who would destroy it, and hope, in appreciation, that Britain might be exempt? Could you go to war against Mohammed, and at the same time, tell him how marvellous you thought Mohammedism is? John Shepherd doesn't think so. He says it's like playing tennis with yourself. You can't win, even if you're the one keeping score.

John is engaged to Sara Grey. He has his doubts about marriage in general, and marrying Sara in particular. Sara works in PR. She's posh. So is John, though not flagrant about it. Their mothers, who live in Surrey, are good friends. They thought it would be nice if their children married. John, aware that Sara is beautiful, accomplished, and in love with him, drifted into being engaged. It seemed to please everybody –just not him. He can't see how he is going to get out of it, and is prepared to let it happen, rather than upset a lot of other people.

Operating in this new location, John encounters Dia, a beautiful Indian girl, with black eyes that shine, a tech-ie genius, whom he is told he can call upon for help as required, and in whom he can place his unequivocal trust. Also here is Farah, a striking Pakistani girl, whose head is covered, not out of religious conviction, but as an enhancement to her beauty. She is in love with Roger, an English co-worker, who is in love with her, and with whom she eventually cohabits.

Bashir, a fellow Pakistani, also employed here, wants Farah for his wife, arranges things with her father, who is dishonoured by his daughter's living arrangements. He kills Roger, tries to kill his daughter, who hovers between life and death.

A growing friendship ensues as John and Dia seek the al Quaida network that wants to destroy the West. Plutonium has disappeared from Sellafield – enough to make six atom bombs. They find, and obliterate, one cell, think that they have solved the problem, until a plane crashes into Parliament, followed by a poison gas attack on the London underground.

ON SINAI'S LOFTY MOUNTAIN

This is a book about a spy. But it is not a spy book. It is about a man employed by US Naval Intelligence who discovers that Iraq was almost a nuclear power, that Iraq possessed large amounts of biological and chemical weaponry meant for the elimination of Israel. This information had been deliberately withheld from Israel, despite an agreement to the contrary, but which Alan Brady supplied. For him, the implications are unmistakably clear: As far as the United States is concerned, Israel is expendable.

But Israel, lacking in gratitude, and finding it politically expedient, repudiates Brady. He is committed to the notorious Marion Prison in Southern Illinois. Leah, his wife, gets five years as an accessory.

Sandy Spaulding, a lawyer, is married to Mark, who is also a lawyer and partner in the United States Center for World Study think-tank. She is dedicated to providing help for the Bradys. Though not born Jewish, she nevertheless   considers herself to be Jewish, until her husband asks her to convert officially, which she refuses to do. She also refuses her son's request for her conversion, without which he cannot have the Bar Mitzvah he intensely desires. Devoted to her husband and son, she probes deeply into her own conscience, her own culture and her own fears, wondering the extent to which these stand in the way of her making that final and decisive step.

ON GALILEE'S SACRED HILL

This is the second book of the trilogy. David Spaulding, son of the powerful, wealthy and socially conscious Spaulding family, whom we met earlier in ON SINAI'S LOFTY MOUNTAIN is now grown up, and reporting behind-the-scene events from Israel. He makes it unmistakably clear that Israel is in mortal danger, and may, in the end, be overcome.

In Israel,  David, encounters, again, Jihan Husseini, a beautiful and prominent Israeli-Arab girl who had saved his life earlier when she revealed that a bomb had been planted under his car. Jihan is deeply in love with David, has been from the time she was fourteen, and her best friend, Shashona Ben Ezra. showed her the photographs of David's Bar Mitzvah, which had taken place at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Shashona, a kibbutz girl, is herself in love with David, though she would never admit it out loud, and perhaps not even to herself. Her family, and David's, have a long history in which together they struggled to create the State or Israel. It would only follow a natural course of events if these two people came together to form a permanent bond between themselves and the two families.

Shashona is a very serious girl, devoted to the Left-wing concepts first promulgated by her kibbutz, in which co-existence with their Arab neighbours is paramount. Jihan, whose father sits in the Israeli Parliament, has been encouraged to step out of the traditional Arab woman's role by her mother. Jihan has spent considerable time with Shashona at the kibbutz, imbibing Western ideas and values.

 At the end of an evening with David, who deposits her near her apartment door, Jihan is attacked by her brothers, (who disapprove of her life-style) is   saved by David, who intervenes, and, along with Jihan, is severely injured. There is a developing closeness between them, and ultimately they express their mutual love. David's parents, not too happy with the arrangements their son has made to marry an Arab girl, particularly when it was Shashona whom they expected to be their daughter-in-law, accept the situation rather than take the chance of losing their son. Jihan begs for their love, offers all of hers to them.

David and Jihan are immensely happy together. Ultimately, they have a child whom they adore, and name after Jihan's mother, Samira, whose husband does not allow her to see the child. But Jihan's brothers, who had fled to Lebanon after the attempt upon their sister's life, now return, and this time succeed in killing her. David is shattered. He seeks out the brothers, is provided with armed support from Jihan's mother.

ON MECCA'S BLOODY SAND

Book three of the trilogy.

Samira, David's daughter, is sixteen. She wears Arab clothes, sees herself, provocatively, as an Arab, reminding David that she is only a quarter Jewish, by blood, not Jewish at all by the criterion employed in Israel. But by virtue of having had an Arab mother, she is more Arab than anything else. She speaks Arabic in preference to Hebrew, promotes the Arab cause. More than teen-age rebellion, it is the clash of two cultures, and deeply disturbing to her father, and to Shashona, her stepmother.

Samira wanders into Hebron, where she talks with, and flirts with a group of young Arab teen-age boys. She is lured into the storage area beneath the living quarters of an elderly Arab woman, where she is gang-raped. A virgin till then, she becomes pregnant, gives birth to the child.

With the help of her Arab grandmother, also Samira, after whom she is named, and the Arab woman in whose premises the rape took place, they track down the perpetrators of this crime, one by one. Samira disposes of each. She is also provided with assistance from a young Israeli serving in Military Intelligence, who falls in love with her. Samira, feeling deeply degraded by her experience, finds it difficult to reciprocate. She pretends to become involved with an Arab Fundamentalist entity, preparing to engage in a suicide bombing within Israel, in which she will be the suicide bomber.

BLACK FUSE is a serious work of fiction, the cover notwithstanding. It is the story of  Rufus N Jones – middle name Nothing. Born in the Deep South of America. Born to struggle. Born black. This is the unrelenting story of how Rufus battled to become a Somebody.

From the time his father was hanged from a tree, to the time Rufus was swept along in a bubbling black tide of hope they called the Civil Rights Movement. And finally to the time he shot dead another black man and fled the drug-filled horrors of the Chicago ghetto.

 This is a tough story of our times. Tough words. Tougher action. For that is how Rufus lived his life.

This is the story of one man's inborn hostility. But it is a story that affects all mankind. A story of our time that has needed to be told.

This is the story of Rufus.

THE BLACK FUSE EXPLODES

THE BLACK FUSE EXPLODES is the next edition, relating the continuing experience of Rufus N Jones, who is now living in Earls Court, London, England. Here he finds it safer than Chicago, where he had robbed a safe, and liquidated some of his former friends, as well as some enemies, like, for example, police personnel. An old Chicago colleague comes looking for him, anxious to share in the profits from that safe cracking. But Rufus doesn't like to share, disposes of his colleague in the Serpentine. Finding it expedient to be out of the country, he makes his way to Paris, where he meets some Soul Brothers, who slip him a mickey, and where he wakes up on the bank of the Seine, in his underwear. For this he takes revenge, moves on to Italy, assiduously avoiding Paris, and returns to London, where he meets a Jamaican girl attending university, toward whom he has special feelings, but is ultimately rejected.

 He goes into the “charity” business, raising money for downtrodden black people, with himself as the main beneficiary. His learning experiences expand, as he travels further afield, buys an unattractive white woman, who proves most unsatisfactory. Motivated by his idealism, he winds up assisting elements of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, one of whose members fancy him, and who forces his ardour on Rufus at gun point. Rufus, not that way inclined, deals with the fellow, in what is for Rufus, a most satisfactory manner.

THREE WINDOWS (a Trilogy)

THREE WINDOWS in which to look, is the over-all title of the three novels presented under this single banner. They are short novels. They go directly to the point, succinctly saying what they need to say, what they want to say. There is no connection between them. Each stands by itself. They survive very well on their own, just as happy as if they had never heard of each other. If there is a common strand, it is there by accident, as an after-thought, almost as a discovery. Journalists figure in all three of the stories. They have nothing to do with each other, have never met, and probably never will.

HEADING SOUTH

Jim Hawthorne is on the plane taking him to Wellen, in the American South, where he will be a guest lecturer, giving a summer course in journalism at the university. Well-known for his column “Walking Around,” and for his book, “American Wars, Necessary and Otherwise,” in which he says the American Civil War was a disastrous mistake, the consequences of which are still being felt currently. He also considers the problem of black Americans in his book, about 27 million of them, few of whom like being black, few of whom like that most of the rest are white. He also says that for a black male, a white woman is a conquest; that the victor takes what he chooses, generally the women. Definitely not politically correct. Jim Hawthorne is idealised in the South.

He is flying away from a disastrous personal life, in which the woman, Julie, with whom he has lived for the past five years, has terminated the relationship, and gone off to marry someone else. At a welcoming barbecue held in his honour, Jim encounters Oriole Madison, a striking light-skinned black girl toward whom he feels an immediate and overwhelming attraction. Her response is mixed, aware as she is of his less than sympathetic attitude. She is here today, to accompany her mother Syrina, who is a famous gospel singer, on the piano.

Jim becomes involved with Oriole, largely a one-sided event, since she is aware of the implications, even in the new South, and, confronting him with the words from his book, suggests that black women, as slaves, were the mistresses of their owners, certainly a triumph for the owners. But she is not entirely indifferent, her feelings for him, strong, if suppressed. Jim is not Oriole's only suitor; Leroy, the church minister, fancies her, though he gets no encouragement from Oriole. Syrina, her mother, is however, most eager for a matrimonial union between them.

Julie appears on the scene, her short marriage a failure, now terminated, she would like to resume life with Jim. In love with her still, Jim has been deeply hurt by her earlier defection, and is aware that his love for Oriole is greater still, though there is no indication that it is, or ever will be, openly reciprocated. Leroy, the minister, profoundly jealous, shoots Jim, who survives, is hospitalised for a time. Jim is allowed ultimately to return home. Oriole comes to look after him, as a nurse, with a purely platonic administration. Leroy, exonerated, but deeply dejected by Oriole's indifference, decides to kill her, sneaks into her house, blasts the sleeping figure on the bed with a shot gun, whom he assumes is Oriole. But it is Syrina he has killed, unaware that Oriole spends her nights looking after Jim.

Oriole, leaning heavily on Jim for emotional support, slowly allows her defences to wane, will in time reciprocate Jim's feelings.

SKETCH BOOK

Aaron Moreheim is testing a fly rod in the window of Goldblatt's Department store, with a view to buying it. Nathalie Weston passes by. They wave to each other, Aaron rather casually. Nathalie comes into the store, goes to the window where Aaron is examining the fly rod. This is a 4th of July weekend coming up, in a middle-size American town. The window display consists of paraphernalia meant for the occasion, including a picnic table and chairs. Nathalie sits down. She is a strikingly beautiful girl. Neither of them speak for a time. Then Nathalie says: “When does it get to be my turn?”

Aaron, who is tall and thin, very muscular and handsome, looks up, startled. “Turn for what?” he asks.

“For your attention,” she replies.

Now he really is startled. “I didn't know you wanted it.”

“You never tried.”

“You always have half the male population of the school gathered around you. I just assumed you weren't interested.”

“You have every girl in school drooling over you. I assumed you were too busy and too uninterested to bother with me.”

Aaron is uncomfortable regarding his popularity. “I go fishing a lot.”

“That's not what I mean.”

“And hunting too – in the season.”

“I'll come with you.”

“What will you do?”

“I'll draw. I'll sketch. I'll paint. I'll take pictures. I'll keep busy.”

“I've only got a shell back on my truck. And a sleeping bag."

Nathalie laughs humourlessly. “The sleeping bag. The famous sleeping bag. There's hardly a girl in town who'd admit she hasn't been in it with you.”

 This is a couple meant for each other. Now it is almost their last chance, and Nathalie knows that she has to speak up. As they talk, it is revealed who they are, what they are, and what they want. Aaron's father is mayor of the town, for the third time, co-opted as a result of his effectiveness. Aaron's mother is a lawyer. Aaron has a younger sister. Aaron's father owns a lumber yard. Aaron works there part time. He is a basketball hero, having sunk the basket, from mid-court, that clinched the championship last season. Aaron isn't keen on basketball, says he doesn't like being with a bunch of sweaty guys chasing, pointlessly, after a ball. But his father says, if you have something to give the town, it is your duty to give it.

Nathalie, besides being beautiful, is also very talented, having won the state's painting competition, and the $500 prize that went with it. This she promptly donated to the Mayor's fund for art for economically disadvantaged kids in town. Nathalie is also rich, money inherited from her now-deceased mother. Her father, an insurance broker, ran against Aaron's father in their first mayoral competition, was thoroughly defeated. In the meantime he almost went to prison for pocketing money meant for the insurance company. Nathalie reimbursed the insurance company, has, in turn, her estate reimbursed by her father over a period of time. Her father is remarried, and with young children. Nathalie is not close to them, would like a family, but not this one.

In this store window they settle their fate and  their future. Henceforth they are a couple, sharing their lives and aspirations. Ultimately they marry. Later, in Israel, covering events there together, and conceiving a child they are both eager to have, Nathalie is struck in the head during the Intifada by an Arab stone thrower, and dies. Aaron borrows an Uzi, confronts the Arabs, and mows them down.

SOLIDARITY, MOTHER, SOLIDARITY FOREVER

This is in part the tale of a family, as narrated by the story-teller, who sees his mother on the picket line, before he is born. Attacked by the police, his mother winds up in jail, with her fellow-pickets. She is a radical lady, who would like to change things in America, by force, if necessary. As a recent immigrant, from Russia, struggling, like most, to earn a living, she is eager to send money to her mother, still in Russia. She finds this somewhat difficult to do, since her wages amount to four dollars a week, and her aunt, with whom she arrived in America, and with whom she lived, charges her four dollars a week for room and board.

Her brother, a cabinetmaker, a Bundist, eager to make the revolution in Russia, is induced by his mother to flee, when his activities become known to the Czarist police. She has agreed to remain behind, to await her son's return, at an opportune time, since the Bundist policy is opposed to immigration. In the meantime the revolution does occur, followed by the Civil War, in which the Bundists have no part, but in which millions die, including their mother. Her death will be on his conscience forever more, aware that his politics compelled her to remain behind.

The narrator, with his background, finding it difficult not to follow a radical path, rejects American values, and, ultimately, America. With his sympathetic wife, they decamp to Europe, settle finally, in unlikely London, physically uncomfortable, but politically, very comfortable. Radical politics have their place here, tolerated, even almost acceptable in a basically conservative society. Europe is open to them, particularly Eastern Europe, with regimes that are both friendly and welcoming. It is only Poland who attempts to enlist our narrator in “activities not commensurate with his status,” (spying) a move, for them, filled with folly, but with useful information gleaned by the narrator, accused, ultimately, of having started the anti-Polish campaign in the West. Radical politics, in due course, are exchanged for conservative ones; in many ways it is an easy transition, the distance required for the journey really quite small. But a certain nostalgia remains.

HISTORIC SOLUTION

This is the book the Germans did not want to come into being. In the beginning they provided a very considerable amount of support, arranging a series of interviews in Germany. However, their ardour cooled when it became obvious that they would not be cast in a particularly favourable light.

The work consists of fourteen interviews conducted in Germany, amongst them: Israel Mellor, aged 20, born in Germany, deeply ambivalent about the country of his birth, wanting to stay, but goaded by a conscience that he feels compels him to leave, is aware that if he does – if all Jews do – Germany becomes ‘Judenfrei', Hitler's greatest aspiration realised.

The Schlesingers returned to Germany after living in Israel for 40 years, left behind three children (one of whom has become totally estranged as a result of their defection), and seven grandchildren. What is their motivation?

There is a mid-30, non-Jewish journalist on a ‘liberal' Berlin paper whose policy is that Jews are all right, but that Israel isn't. Is there a separation between Jews and Israel?

Hilde Eisler, who, with her husband, fled to the United States for asylum, where they were persecuted for their Communist sympathies. Returning to East Germany after the War, Hilde Eisler edited the GDR's most popular monthly, ‘Das Magazin'. Her husband was Head of GDR Broadcasting. They never compro mised their Jewish principles, or their support for Israel, despite the overt hostility demonstrably expressed by the government they had wished to serve.

The others who speak, provide a profoundly important insight.

Historical data is presented between the interviews, which gives meaning to all that has gone before, and all that made the Holocaust possible. It provides an understanding of those events in the context in which they took place, and could take place, and brings us up to the present moment in time.

The Historic Solution, the title of this work, is the age-old solution: It's all the fault of the Jews. Is it not conceivable that the Jew on the cross made the Holocaust possible?

FINDEM/FEELEM

Christine, enjoying the experience of breast feeding her baby, tells him about her life and the circumstances of his conception and birth. She assures him that theirs was a proper marriage, which actually took place in a church. But her husband, soon tired of the role of father and husband, took off, which she hopes will be forever. She explains how she created her son, and how she will be expected to give him away some day, to another woman, an arrangement that is quite usual, but one that in her case, she regards as totally unfair.  She isn't going to give him up, she explains – ever. “Mother Nature,” she declares, “I have made the next generation, and I am keeping it. I have no intention of passing it on. If that is unnatural, all I can do is shrug with indifference.”

Christine was abused by her father. Christine's mother took a kitchen knife and stabbed Christine's father. She failed to kill him, which distressed her greatly. For her efforts she is sent to prison. She explained to Christine about sex: “You got a harbour. And the men in this world all want to come sailing in, all nice and easy and smooth, with a romantic moon up there in the sky. But that's not just a sailboat they got, all innocent and romantic. On board they're carrying a lightning rod. They sail around in the harbour a bit, and then the lightning rod fires its load. It's deadly, that lightning rod juice. Once it strikes you, you're gone.”

Christine, as an adult woman, explains things to her infant son: “You know, Spencer, in an ideal world all men would have that protective covering (foreskin) tied tightly, maybe with a yellow ribbon, or a red one; I don't suppose the colour matters much. It would be the women who held the other end. And it would be only them who could untie it – when they wanted to.”

WOE TO THE REBELLIOUS CHILDREN

A work of vintage fiction, going back to a dark time in American history when a need to fuel the American economy, fuelled a war in Korea and a witch hunt in America. In this book, those young adults, who are unable, or unwilling, to conform to the norms of a rigid political society, risk more than marginalisation; one is drafted into the military, where he serves in Korea and is wounded. Another, refusing to co-operate with the House un-American Activities Committee is sent to prison. These had to be amongst the darkest days in American history, when an enemy was created out of a need to have one. Only with the advent of another war, in which those who were expected to participate, refused, did the American age of darkness finally come to an end. 

AND GOD LAUGHED

Humboldt Park, Chicago, USA. This is a vintage novel about an area that had previously failed to motivate any of the many writers who emerged from Chicago's rich soul. Probably because they thought there was nothing to write about. They were wrong. This work is proof of that.

Humboldt Park was an area for those who were on the way up, and out of here, but stuck -- temporarily, they hoped -- until they could do better. It was also an area for those on the way down, and hoped they would go no further. In class terms it was lower middle-class, mostly, essentially a derogatory delineation. There were a lot of Jews, and a lot of Polocks. And a smattering of others. The Jews didn't like the Polocks, and the Polocks didn't like the Jews. It was history. It all started in Poland, when they heard about what happened to Christ. Who could change history?

This is about the people in Humboldt Park, mostly young, most of whom go to Lowell School, a depressing institution, made that way by teachers whose lives in and out of the classroom were essentially miserable. There was noting to teach, and nothing to learn. There is a feeling that a revolution would make things better, but nobody knows how to make a revolution, or even what it is, other than that they had one in 1776. It will never happen. And it never does. In Lowell School, for example, they were singing Christmas carols, since it was Christmas, but, there is no special involvement for the Jews who didn't really like singing Christmas carols; they didn't ask the gentiles to sing Chanukah songs. This was at a time before the gentiles actually did. And they did actually make their own little revolution. They sang out, loud and clear: “Deck the halls with shmaltz (Yiddish for ‘fat') and Chollie (Jewish plaited bread)” – fa la la, la la, la la la la.”

One of the boys marries a shiksa, who turns out to be anti-Semitic. Another rejects the girl he should have married, accepts what he perceives as a reasonable substitute, discovers that she isn't; he returns more than 20 years later to seek out the original and try to rectify his mistake.

Sidney Du Broff's Shooting and Fishing Journal

The Journal is a quarterly magazine on the web, concerned with the romance of the outdoors in the pursuit of fish and game www.sidsjournal.com .  It travels where it wants to go, where its readers like to be taken, to Russia, for example, after giant wild boar. Read about the small boat with two fishermen off the California coast, battling against the afternoon swells. Will they make it to shore intact? Check out Issue Number 16. See the art of Mary Orvis Marbury and learn about the life of a remarkable woman, deeply involved in the creation of flies meant to fool trout and bass. Read a fishing diary, an account of successes and failures, of flies that were created, that worked as if by magic, or failed miserably.

The Journal takes deep pride in not being politically correct. As the Journal sees it, shooting and fishing are expressions of the highest ideals, which produce a profound spiritual satisfaction. These are basic pursuits, meant to provide sustenance, meant to sustain life, meant to allow us today, to recreate our primitive past. No apologies necessary.

STILL WATER FLY FISHING FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

This book is meant to address the needs of the young person who is also a beginner, very different from the needs of an adult who is just starting out. If the family is not sympathetic, the embryonic fisher person may be dead in the water before he or she ever gets to cast a fly in the direction of a rising trout. That is one of the disadvantages to being a young, aspiring fly fishing person. Finance is a serious problem, not that this book will explain how to overcome either problem, but it does go a long way toward creating a sympathetic approach in so far as parents are concerned. Clean your own fish. Don't get into a car with muddy boots. Cook a fish dinner for your family – a recipe is included.

The writing is chatty, never patronising, never talks down to the young reader. Instructions are easy to follow, made, generally, as suggestions, rather than as dogmatic concepts. While conceived as a primer meant to serve as a guide on English still-waters, its universality will easily transcend a specific domain.

FLY FISHING ON STILL WATER

Here is a fishing diary, filled with the joy and pleasure of being out there. The book rings of it, and the reader shares every moment. Remember, this is still water, a great English success story, engendered by people, who, in many cases, had to be crazy to invest their money and their lives in anything so precarious. These waters are used-up quarries that were flooded, and turned into lakes, where none existed before; they are purpose-built lakes, reservoirs, meant for the supply of water; and they are lakes literally dug out of the ground. And into them have gone trout. And who now, looking at them, could believe that they hadn't always been there. The unnatural has become natural. Those trout feed on what they find in their “new” environment, and they take a fly because they want to.

With the reports come instruction, not at all intrusive, but there by way of explanation. Next time you'll try that, and maybe it will work, you think. And maybe it will. The flies that brought success, often original creations, are described so that the reader can reproduce his own . If you don't tie your own, this book tells you how.

SHOOTING, FISHING AND GUN BOOK

The Shooting, Fishing and Gun Book tells about shooting and fishing in a wide variety of places. The introduction puts it this way: “We have set out to entertain, and to inform. We hope that we have succeeded. It is our sincere wish to serve those who shoot and fish, who would like to do either, or those who merely want to read about them.”

Read about how they go shooting in East Germany, or used to go, when there was an East Germany. Hear about the hare drive, about the discipline imposed (as you would expect). Learn about  Portugal, where there is a need for some discipline, where “game,” for stocking comes from the pet shop. What about a gun museum? Try the Royal Arsenal in Copenhagen. It's a feely-touchy place (no, you can't fire the guns). Do you know about the Kalthoff, a repeating arm that goes back to about 1645, a wheel lock with a highly sophisticated clock mechanism? What about goat, in Northern Ireland, of all places? Did you ever try eating one? Not bad. Not bad at all. You want to pound it with a meat hammer, until nice and tender, and your guests wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and veal scaloppini.  Salmon in the Thames? This work anticipated it, in the form of a story, before it ever happened. What ever did happen to that experiment, putting salmon in the Thames? It looks like it was just fantasy after all.

SID DU BROFF'S FISHING DIARY

The Diary is an account of the glorious days on the water, fishing with a fly, sometimes with success, sometimes with dismal failure. Don't read this book with the intention of learning anything, though you probably will, but more by osmosis than by design.

Read it for the unadulterated joy and pleasure that it provides. Fishing is life: there are the highs that are expressions of success, and the frustrations that bring us down, humble us, remind us that no matter how hard we try, we don't make it.  Did we do something wrong? What could have, would have, been right? We ponder, we strive, we never give up, and then, in the end, we succeed. It feels good, doesn't it? Blessed be those of us who exist in this milieu. That is why this is such a fun book, such a source of deep pleasure; it is a shared pleasure, a shared blessing.

SID DU BROFF'S SHOOTING DIARY

Is an account of the days afield. Du Broff has killed wild boar in Russia, but it is the days on his own that have provided the greatest reward. It is the hunting feeling; it is inside you. You are looking for a quarry. You are back to a time, in your primitive past, when if you didn't find it, you didn't eat. Feels good, doesn't it? It feels particularly good when a pheasant, for example, rises before you, startling you as usual -- as if you hadn't heard the same sound a thousand times before. You throw your gun to your shoulder and shoot, and the bird crumbles in mid-air. What an immense feeling of satisfaction. It goes even beyond the immediate moment of success, but to an earlier time, inherent in the bosom of all hunters, when it meant that you and your family would be the benefactors of what Mother Nature had provided. And also, recall the despair when the quarry moved off, completely unscathed.

Copyright Sidney Du Broff 2009  (C)