"In A Jerk on One End, Hughes traces his love of fishing back to his earliest boyhood on Sydney Harbor, Australia, and recounts the high and low points of his career with rod and reel - the first surge of triumph when he snagged a six-pound bonito, the shame of having his father catch him trout-fishing with live bait (the most perfidious failing in the eyes of every fly fisher), hair-raising shark tales he picked up on the Sydney waterfront.".

"Here too is a history of fishing going back to classical antiquity, along with meditations on the art and philosophy of fishing and deep draughts of the finest fishing writing through the ages.

Hughes gazes long and hard into the shining eyes of his prey and captures the essence of each noble species in verbal portraits - the delicate striped bass, most amenable to cooking and most susceptible to urban pollutants; the infinitely treacherous tarpon; the fastidious, elusive trout; the giant bluefin tuna, which holds the dubious honor of being the most expensive and sought after animal on earth.

And in one passage, he adopts the fish's point of view and forces us to imagine the horror of being hooked and reeled into an alien element."--BOOK JACKET.