Joe and Me: An Education in Fishing and Friendship

James Prosek is angling's wunderkind. A recent Yale graduate, he debuted in 1996 at age 20 with the well-received Trout: An Illustrated History, in which his precocity with both words and watercolors were charmingly displayed. Joe and Me is a more personal and complex volume, a memoir of a relationship-in-progress that began five years ago when Prosek was caught poaching on Connecticut's Aspetuck River by warden Joe Haines. What follows is an engaging tale of how much the warden and poacher have to teach each other. Prosek's prose has a few glitches, but he's young and can be forgiven; his watercolors, which run throughout, are a catch in themselves.