Harry Middleton in The Smokies

For any angler who has read his classic works, it is hard to enter the Great Smokey Mountains without channelling Harry Middleton.  Count The Literary Fly Fisher in that group, as they quote Russell Chatham’s preface to The Earth is Enough:

Passion and soul, the dual sources of everything valuable and meaningful, are not very hot commodities in our largely puritanical, calvinistic, money-driven republic.  In a society like ours, layered with ennui, greed, aggressive ignorance, dispassionate, poor-quality living, all soaked in a gooey solution of snake-belly-grade voyeurism a la Oprah et al., the sensitive frequently don’t make it.

Read a review of Middleton’s “In That Sweet Country” by Jason Sheasley on MidCurrent.