Next week, Richard Louv will be a keynoter at the Opening Session of the 72nd North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, in Portland, Oregon. His remarks will center on the subject of his best-selling book, Last Child in the Woods, a really important volume and a much better read that you might expect. But that's not the title reviewed here. Instead, I want to tell you about a book I read and thoroughly enjoyed shortly after its release in 2000, and which I just reread and liked even more. It is Fly-Fishing for Sharks: An American Journey, also written by Richard Louv.

Fly-fishing for sharks?mainly blue sharks, but the occasional Mako (which smacks of dodging grenade shrapnel for the fun of it)?truly relates to only one segment of the narrative and is about the only thing that hasn't enamored me about this work. "Gone Fishing" would have been a more apt title, but maybe that was taken.

The rest of the book is a quest to determine "how fishing renews us, and how we can renew fishing by rethinking our roles as stewards." Mostly the former, actually. It is a Charles Kuralt-type probe of the angling culture in the United States, but with less deadpan. "Angling cultures" is more accurate, because there are a lot of them.

Through investigative reporting, personal experience, and the eyes and preoccupation of anglers from Pacific waters off Southern California to Vermont streams to frozen lakes of Michigan's Upper Peninsula to the Florida Keys to the rivers of Harlem and beyond, Louv examines what differentiates the fishing cultures. They vary by equipment, bait or lures, angling techniques, waters, species of fish sought, and in what and how much people invest of their time, dollars and persona. But there is more to Louv's travelogue (he modestly claims no expertise at angling). He unveils that fishing is infinitely psychological. He reports that fishing perhaps "is not so much about introspection?as it is about outer inspection." It "is about the pursuit of happiness," serendipity and "just a good excuse to look into water or up at stars." This resonates oddly metaphysical?or Rotarian.

But it's not, because the people he meets and interviews, from all walks and shores of life, are obsessive anglers, which is somewhat redundant, because there apparently are no casual fishers. Some of these people are certified eccentrics. There is Nick of New Mexico, who opines that being a fly-fisherman is the only thing better than being a Marxist. There is a Montana guide who knows that hooking a fish changes everything. There is a fishing guide of Florida's pay-hay-okee, who is known by some as Captain Dirt because of his advanced age. There is intense Robert Kennedy Jr., whose brother Joe finds fishing a contact sport. There is Whitefish Willy (aka Roadkill Willy), who, when told that his locale probably is God's country, offered that if God ever showed up there, He'd probably get lost. There are icons, such as Joan Wulff and Sugar Ferris, corporate execs, charter captains, piscatorial purists, rubes, gearheads, doddle sockers, steelheaders, tweedies, dappers, and many delightful more.

Louv writes about (and participates in) tournament fishing ("among the most American of sports"), about the retail giant Bass Pro ("something of a church, in the southern-midwestern branch of the religion of fishing?Our Lady of Abu Garcia"), about the accoutrement of fishing ("Thoreau, encountering a fully equipped Roland Martin, would have wept"), about mullet thunder. Angler readers will know or know about the transcendental aspiration to "deep fishing" and "rivertime." Non-obsessed readers will learn the compelling nature of a drifting Royal Coachman or a twitchy jitterbug or a nervous bobber.

On the one hand, Louv suggests, fishing is an escape. He later supposes that people fish because they don't truly know what's down there. It may be a meal, or dollars, or trophies, or daydreams, or bragging rights, or time away from the human condition and cynicism, or maybe a monster. But with each cast or release of a fishing line, there lurks in the mind of the fisher the same gripping suspense expressed by the foiled bank robber in Dirty Harry I: "Man, I just gots to know."

Dame Juliana Berners, the Lady Prioress of Sopwell Nunnery, who may have written The Book of St. Albans (England), published in 1486, is thought to have penned the first essay on sport fishing. With Fly-fishing for Sharks, all 494 pages, Rich Louv penned one of sport fishing's best-ever guide stories. What's a guide story? Read the book; the definition is in there somewhere; fish for it. But know going in that you will find the work informative, refreshing and enormously entertaining. And it carries with it the seeds of Last Child in the Woods.

Fly-fishing for Sharks was reissued in 2001 in soft cover and can be purchased on-line at www.simonsays.com for $6.49 or by calling 1-800-331-6531.