cover image The Bear in the Attic

The Bear in the Attic

Patrick F. McManus. Henry Holt & Company, $22 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-8050-7078-1

Prolific humorist Patrick McManus (The Deer on a Bicycle) offers another winsome collection of anecdotes and essays on fishing, camping, hunting and other outdoor activities and catastrophes. Childhood hijinks loom especially large in The Bear in the Attic: McManus recalls youthful culinary misadventures that culminated in a rock-hard loaf of bread useful only as a football; faking a cold so that he could finish an overdue book report only to take a disastrous impromptu fishing trip with the eccentric neighborhood woodsman; and other mischief-making. McManus also intersperses more recent tales of the sporting life as well as family life in his native North Idaho.