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"To some foreigners," writes American journalist Fen Montaigne, "Russia was anathema, a place grim beyond description But to others, such as myself, Russia was an affliction, an incurable habit. From the very beginning, I was drawn to her dilapidated landscape, inhabited by people who knew hardship as intimately as we might a member of the family." After completing a stint as Moscow bureau chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996, Montaigne resolves to feed his habit in a somewhat unorthodox manner: a three-month fly-fishing expedition that will cross 10 time zones from west to east and cover 7,000 miles.

Traveling with a duffel bag bulging with state-of-the-art fishing gear is probably not the best way to journey through a largely impoverished land without arousing suspicion, but the neophyte fly-fisher is romanced by the vastness and anonymity of the place and simply cannot resist. Unknown rivers and lakes, after all, are the stuff of anglers' dreams, and so Montaigne blithely sets out with dancing trout and salmon in his head. All too soon, however, he is disabused of such gumdrop notions. Environmental degradation, bureaucratic hoops, unscrupulous "entrepreneurs," and a parade of vodka parties greet him at nearly every stop.

Montaigne's initial quest is swiftly superseded by a series of picaresque misadventures--some comic, others frightening--that serve to educate the innocent abroad as well as the reader. He tours centuries-old monasteries on the Solovetski archipelago that Stalin once turned into gulags, stumbles across a shallow grave near the Kolyma slave mines, narrowly escapes a pair of buxom highway robbers on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and breaks bread with fish-poaching apparatchiks on the Detrin River. Revealed along the way is a country in utter turmoil, trying to escape from its past without a destination in mind, almost childlike in its simplicity. Some of these East-meets-West scenes are strangely poignant in their squalor. At one vodka-soaked stop, the author obligingly gets drunk with the locals and caps the night by driving a brakeless Ural truck through town, much to the hoots and delight of his hosts: "'Second! Second!' the boys hollered as the engine whined, and I jammed the heavy stick into second gear. We hit a straightaway. I shifted into third and cranked the Ural up to about 25 miles an hour. Ashes from their cigarettes flitted about the cabin. I glanced over at the boys and saw that great, demented smiles had spread on their faces."

Eventually Montaigne overcomes his ineptitude with a flyrod and manages to hook into some nice fish, but his triumph hardly matters; the real catch of the day is the distillation of a moment in time, when a people and their nation drift helplessly in the current. --Langdon Cook.
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"Older gay men and younger gay men rarely talk to each other. We're like Italian salad dressing in the fridge. You can shake us all you want but eventually we'll lift, separate, and retreat to separate halves of the bottle."

Reeling in the Years: Gay Men's Perspectives on Age and Ageism examines the "two tribe" mentality about age that divides the gay male community into "us" and "them." Tim Bergling, author of the critically acclaimed Sissyphobia (Haworth), uses polls, surveys, and interviews conducted with men from five different age groups to illustrate the gay community's attitudes toward age and the rites of passage associated with certain age groups. The book explores the gay experience through young, middle-aged, and elderly viewpoints, including relationships, dating younger guys, dating older guys, the Internet, sex, drugs, alcohol, HIV/AIDS, fitness, plastic surgery, retirement, harassment, and discrimination.

"Old men come off as whorish, bitter old queens."

"Young people today seem to whine a lot more than we ever did."

"Most older guys are just trying to figure out a way to get a young guy in the sack."

"All these younger guys think older guys like me just want to get them into bed."

Why don't the Generations Gay mix well? Reeling in the Years gets right to the heart of the matter, examining the wide range of emotions at work in younger/older gay male relationships—from fear and loathing to love and happiness. Beneath the bitchy asides, passionate relationships, rock-solid friendships, and hateful distrust, men struggle to answer the question: "Can older gay men really be friends with younger gay men?" In their own words, hundreds of men discuss what it's like to be 16, 28, 40, or 70, examining myth and reality about age and aging from different attitudes and perspectives.

"The older a guy gets, the more out of touch he is."

"A 20-year-old hasn't really been anywhere or done anything."

"If you're gray, stay away!"

"These kids today just piss me off."

Reeling in the Years examines the fear, suspicion, and prejudice that exists at both ends of the age spectrum of the gay experience, while displaying rays of hope, acceptance, and understanding for a possible truce in the war between the ages.

"I wish older people would treat us with more respect, like we might have an idea or two in our heads. And I'm ashamed when I see the way people my age treat older guys. We're going to be older one day, too.".
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Four women find themselves wading into unexpected love. After her ex-husband's death, Ruby Townsend feels free to test the waters of romance again. Will she find the right fish in the sea this time? Barbara Elliott enjoys a life of meticulous order. Is there any hope for a laidback fisherman in her life? When Nicole Quinn teams up with a fly fisherman, love takes flight. But before their hearts get too entangled, can Nicole first loose her heart to God? Lia Stephanos takes up fishing to help repair frazzled nerves. Will she soon find her heart drifting into calmer, deeper waters? Can these women come away with the biggest catch of their lives?.
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This study, the first of two parts which will give a comprehensive account of Chinese textiles and textile technology, deals with the evolution of bast fibre spinning and silk-reeling in the history of China. These operations are the basic techniques in the production of yarn and thread, pre-requisite to weaving, and any study of Chinese textile technology must start with the raw material obtained from fibre plants such as hemp, ramie, jute, cotton, etc, and silk reeled off from cocoons of the domestic silkworm. Here for the first time in a publication outside China, the raw material, and the processing techniques applied to it, are documented in their context of historical evolution, geographical distribution and economic significance in an agrarian society. The time-span covered runs from the neolithic to the nineteenth century. Archaeological and pictoral evidence, the bulk of it hitherto unpublished in the West, is brought together with Chinese textual sources (which are extensively translated and interpreted) to illustrate Chinese achievements in this field. Professor Kuhn's study reveals the way in which Chinese textile-technological inventiveness has influenced textile production in other regions of the world and in medieval Europe. It explains how textile technology reached its high point between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and attempts to indicate the reasons for its subsequent relative decline. The development of the textile industry in Europe was a key factor in the rise of capitalism. In the case of China after Sung times, textile technology and the organisation of textile labour may help indicate why such a development did not take place in China..
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