"Anyone interested in fly fishing or curious how the sport could possibly be of interest to anyone should hop to David Coggins's excellent The Optimist. " --The New York Times "Immersive, true, pitch-perfect, and a soon-to-be classic. Coggins is a fresh voice in the fly-fishing canon, a wry genius, and the perfect guide for angler and non-angler alike." -- Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of Water "To paraphrase an old saying: Writing about fly fishing is like dancing about architecture. It's nearly impossible to capture but David Coggins does it as well as anyone, and I thrilled to his adventures from England to Patagonia to America's great rivers." -- Tom Rosenbauer, author of The Orvis Fly-Fishing Guide "I've fished many of the rivers in this book but I hadn't seen them run and shimmer the way they do in Coggins's lively prose. What's more, I'd given up on fishing, I don't know why--maybe the world was too much with me; okay, let's just say I've been preoccupied with ephemera rather than the eternal, which is what fly-fishing makes one confront. I closed this last chapter and said hell or high water, I was going to get back to the rivers and streams I've missed.

There's much to fall in love with in this world, and this book reminded me of that." -- Doug Stanton, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Horse Soldiers " The Optimist is a rueful, thoughtful and very funny examination of an elegant obsession. Coggins does a terrific job of evoking the joys of fly fishing and also the frustrations, which are inextricably linked. This is the best book I've read on fishing since Thomas McGuane's The Longest Silence ." -- Jay McInerney.