Liar's Code: Growing Up Fishing

Warm, funny, and memorable musings on a life spent fishing.

With this eclectic collection of personal essays taking him from his childhood haunts along the industrial Niagara River of the 1960s to Alaska and the saltwater flats of the Caribbean, Richard Chiappone elongates the fishing-writing genre, suggesting that he finds almost anything a fisherman does interesting—anything but the actual fishing.

In one piece, he gets no farther than the curb outside his upstate New York childhood home, f...