Reel Deep in Montana's Rivers

The pun in the title gives warning that this new volume of Holt's journals of Montana angling (after Knee Deep in Montana's Trout Streams and Waist Deep in Montana's Lakes ) is the shallowest and most facile of the three. He offers serious reporting on endangered bull-trout angling and the environment, particularly that of the drainages of the Tongue, Flathead, Swan, Sun and Jefferson rivers. But the rest of this slight collection smacks of an amateur stand-up comic's routine. Warnings about stream habitat losses in Montana, which is arguably the last great wild trout fishery in the lower 48, are enervated by too lengthy sentences, by scripted conversations the author imagines pursuing with Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials and by jabs at developers and clear-cutters. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)