List Price

$26.00

Textbook Details

  • ISBN:
    0300140878
  • ISBN-13:
    9780300140873
  • PUB. DATE:
    March 2010
  • PUBLISHER:
    Yale University Press
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An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World by Anders Halverson

$26.00 List Price
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Customer Reviews

A must read for trout anglers!by Mark-Massachusetts

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Most Fly Fishers (fisherman) enjoy the picking the fly on the lightest possible rod and experience the thrill of a big trout pulling all parts of the tackle to its extreme. But most don't know that the rainbow that is pulling comes from thousand of miles away and has been nurtured in a hatchery by professionals that are not aware of the long history themselves of this pacific rim fish.

This...

Informative and Entertainingby Cardopski

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This made for an easy and joyful read. I was left feeling it ended too soon. The issues are as relevant today as they were then and will be for years to come. Anders offers an impartial wide view of the never ending touch and go relationship between man and this fabled fish. Add it to your collection, knowledge and conversations.

Amazing Bookby Anonymous

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I'll never look at rainbow trout, or even the streams where they now live, the same way again.

This book tells an incredible story about these fish--fish that I had taken for granted until now. And it is so well written. A must read.

Overview -

An Entirely Synthetic Fish

Product Details

  • Pub. Date: March 2010
  • Publisher: Yale University Press
  • Sales Rank: 590,304

Synopsis

Anders Halverson provides an exhaustively researched and grippingly rendered account of the rainbow trout and why it has become the most commonly stocked and controversial freshwater fish in the United States. Discovered in the remote waters of northern California, rainbow trout have been artificially propagated and distributed for more than 130 years by government officials eager to present Americans with an opportunity to get back to nature by going fishing. Proudly dubbed “an entirely synthetic fish” by fisheries managers, the rainbow trout has been introduced into every state and province in the United States and Canada and to every continent except Antarctica, often with devastating effects on the native fauna. Halverson examines the paradoxes and reveals a range of characters, from nineteenth-century boosters who believed rainbows could be the saviors of democracy to twenty-first-century biologists who now seek to eradicate them from waters around the globe. Ultimately, the story of the rainbow trout is the story of our relationship with the natural world—how it has changed and how it startlingly has not.

The Washington Post - Ken Ringle

…history, as we know but seldom remember, is often about unintended consequences, and few better examples can be cited than the story told in An Entirely Synthetic Fish, Anders Halverson's chronicle of how our best-intentioned efforts to widen and democratize the sport of trout fishing compromised mountain streams and lakes in often subtle but disturbing ways…Yet this is not one of those whiny, hand-wringing catalogs of environmental gloom and doom. With prose as engaging as it is thoughtful, Halverson has crafted an absorbing cautionary tale of ecological trial and error, documenting our tardy but increasing understanding of biological interdependence and its immeasurable value.

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Biography

Anders Halverson is a journalist with a Ph.D. in aquatic ecology from Yale University. He lives in Boulder, CO.