Certain stories come into your life, and because of the way they come, or the timing of the moment, or because of what they speak to you when they do arrive, they become a part of your soul-library—books that both shape and reflect who you are as a man. One of those stories for me is Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It.
“In our family,” the tale begins, “there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” It is part memoir, part celebration of fly fishing and wild places, part tragedy, set in rough-and-tumble Missoula Montana in the 1920s.
Norman and his younger brother Paul have a Huck Finn-like childhood, coming of age at a time when lumberjacks still...
