Latest Book
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Eels |
Purchase: Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Coming in September 2010
They are the only fish that spawn in the middle of the ocean but spend their adult lives in freshwater. They can overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and even cross over land. They are revered as guardians and monster-seducers by New Zealand's Maori, and have inspired myths concerning breadfruit, banana, and coconut among the Pacific Island peoples. Often viewed with disgust in the West, they are a multibillion dollar business in the Asian food market—the Japanese est them to beat summer fatigue. And they are often mistaken for snakes. They are eels—one of the world's most amazing and least understood fish (Yes, fish.)
James Prosek offers a fascinating tour through the life history and cultural associations of the freshwater eel, exploring its biology in streams and epic migrations in the ocean, its myth and lore, its mystery and beauty. Prosek travels the globe to tell the story of the eel—from New York to New Zealand; from Europe to the small island of Pohnpei Micronesia, where freshwater eels are worshipped by members of the eel clan. Along the way he introduces individuals whose lives are most connected with the eels' story—including fishermen, conservationists, and scientists seeking to uncover the eels' elusive home in the Sargasso Sea and their spawning places in other oceans of the world. Though eels have been here for hundreds of millions of years, populations of freshwater eels are rapidly declining, largely due to dams, overfishing, pollution, and perhaps even global climate change.
Illustrated with etchings by the author, Eels is a mesmerizing biography and history of this intriguing and mysterious creature. It is also a telling look at humanity, the will to persist, and the ever-changing relationship between man and the natural world.
Eels can grow as big as pythons and routinely do in the western Pacific, and they are slimy and can inflict a wicked bite. Their association with the snake often stirs unease, but not in the author, who has fallen under the eel’s spell—not unlike that experienced in the cultures and cosmologies of the Maori of New Zealand, the Chinese and Japanese and the people on the Pacific island of Pohnpei, Micronesia. Though Prosek doesn’t neglect the natural history of the eel, so little is known about its lifeways that he concentrates more on the symbolic powers of the giant freshwater eel. These accounts offer glimpses into the faith and traditions of frequently mysterious cultures, yet some Maoris and Pohnpeians recognized in the author a sympathetic soul, unlike those of the colonizing Europeans who nearly eradicated the Maori, as well as their eel as a icon. Prosek understands that in retelling these stories he offers only a glimmering of the eels’ customary complexity and ambiguity, but he does well in interweaving the mythological and the personal. The author is also a diligent natural historian, keen to the greater landscape. He vividly evokes a bleached-white coral path reflecting the moonlight on Pohnpei, and an eel catcher on the Delaware River, “with his long beard, the hills of the Catskills and the rusty yellow foliage of the beech trees behind him...looked like an old Russian bush guide making his way up the Amur.” Prosek provides plenty of fun facts, as well—the Borgias may have used eel- blood poison on their enemies, and “the astronomer Montanari believed that an eel’s liver facilitated delivery in childbirth.” A warm, enrapturing paean to the totemic potency of eels.
— KIRKUS REVIEWS July 1, 2010
“It is a great relief on this deceptively familiar earth to be reminded that the natural world goes on being replete with mysteries. Few are so intertwined with our terrestrial and marine preconceptions as the great family of eels. James Prosek explores their astonishing lives in service to our proper awe of nature. This is a delightful work with the urgency of a good detective story.”
— Thomas McGuane
“James Prosek’s Eels is a wonderful account of far-flung travels in pursuit of the secrets of the earth’s most mysterious fish and also of the eel’s prominence in the Creation myths and present-day fisheries of traditional peoples, New Zealand’s Maori, in particular; his experiences in that culture are fascinating and beautifully rendered. Altogether, a very fine book.”
— Peter Matthiessen
“I loved it! A beautiful adventure story of one of the most wide-spread and least-known but ecologically important fish. Prosek combines their amazing biology with adventure and politics. We now have to wonder if these, once some of the most common of fish, are going the way of the cod, the passenger pigeon and the bison.”
— Bernd Heinrich, author of Summer World
"[A] riveting synthesis of cultural, geographical, and botanical sleuthing. . .”
— Publisher's Weekly
Complete Library
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Bird, Butterfly, Eel |
Bird, Butterfly, and Eel, spend their summers on the same coastal farm, but in the fall they go to very distant and different places. Their journeys to the far reaches of land and sea make them remarkable creatures. More
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The Day My Mother Left |
Jeremy’s whole life changed the day his mother left. When his mother leaves with the father of his worst enemy at school, nine year old Jeremy seeks to make sense of her abandonment. More
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Tight Lines: Ten Years of the Yale Anglers' Journal |
Founded in 1996 by undergraduates James Prosek and Joe Furia, the Yale Anglers' Journal plays the heartstrings. Its widely varied contents - poetry, essays, letters, humor and adventure narrative - seem to encompass the breadth and depth of human experience. More
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A Good Day’s Fishing |
What’s the secret to a good day’s fishing? James Prosek illustrates the essentials, in his first children’s picture book. The flies, lures, spinners and bobbers in his tackle box are depicted in colorful watercolors and defined in the helpful “Lure and Fly Glossary” located in the final five pages of the book. More
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Trout of the World |
From the rare Tigris Trout of Eastern Turkey to the Cutthroat Trout of the Russian Sea of Okhotsk, James Prosek brings to life 100 trout from around the world. Trout of the World is the product of six years of travel and research around the Northern Hemisphere in Europe, Asia and North Africa. More
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Fly-Fishing the 41st From Connecticut
to Mongolia and Home Again: A Fisherman’s Odyssey |
James Prosek begins Fly-Fishing the 41st with, “One day, I left in a straight line from home at 41 Kachele Street, east along the 41st Parallel, following my passion for fish. It was a journey not only away from home, but toward it; which is the beauty of traveling in a circle, and the irony of adventure.” More
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Early Love and Brook Trout |
This poignant and revealing memoir, includes brilliant images and watercolor paintings of spawning brook trout from Quebec to Georgia, fishing with his best friend, Taylor; his relationship with young love, Whitney; his rowing days at Yale; his relationship to old game warden, Joe Haines; and a night spent trapped in a cabin during a flood at the foot of the Smoky Mountains. More
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A Connecticut Yankee Follows
in the Footsteps of Walton: The Complete Angler |
As a senior at Yale, James Prosek won a traveling fellowship to follow in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth century author of The Compleat Angler. The book became his obsession and along Prosek’s pilgrimage through England, he made friends and fished the waters Walton had fished over three centuries ago. More
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Joe and Me: An Education in
Fishing and Friendship |
When James Prosek was fourteen, a ranger named Joe Haines caught him “poaching” from a reservoir nearby Prosek’s home in Easton, Connecticut. Instead of running from the old man in the green uniform, Prosek surrendered only to find himself a new friend and mentor. More
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Trout: An Illustrated History |
James Prosek’s first book catalogues more than 70 native trout from North America in brilliant watercolor paintings. More