For those of not familiar with who Charlie Fox was, he was one of the Pennsylvania limestone anglers who, in the mid-20th century, advanced much of what we know about flies & how trout interact with them. This group of dedicated anglers discovered a lot of the tools & techniques we still use to fool difficult trout today.
What I like about the book is that while it does give you tons of tips & how-to info, it's not an instructional book like most others are. Fox gives you great lessons while telling you stories. It's a lot like you're sitting down to coffee with this very experienced & skilled angler. His writing is smooth & easy to follow, making it a pleasure to read. In fact, flipping through these pages I was chuckling to myself, thinking that while things in fly fishing advance, some of the core tactics & principals never change.
This book won't take you from beginner to advanced angler, but it will help you tweak & adjust the things you do on the stream already. It will help you to look at fish & the water better & give you inspiration for ideas on how to fool trout more efficiently. More than that, it will strengthen your love & appreciation for fly fishing.
If I could offer just one warning for the book: be careful to remember that most (but not all) of Fox's experienced in this book focus around the limestone streams of Pennsylvania. While the techniques that he offers will work anywhere, you should know that these limestone streams are, in many ways, a completely different world than most freestone streams. That difference alone could be the topic of an entire book, but please keep this in mind - especially when Fox writes about fly fishing in the winter.
The last section of the book talks about stream & fish conservation. It's interesting to look back & see what the state of our streams was back then. In many ways we've come a long way & our fish & streams are in better shape than they were in the 1970's, but in other ways we've fallen short of the efforts we should have taken to make better fisheries. I'll leave it to you to decide where & how we've fallen short, but this book makes you think of those things & that's always good when folks have conservation on their minds.
Overall this is one book I would recommend for you, to keep you company on these long winter nights. If you can't physically cast your flies to rising trout right now, at least you can in your mind & this book will most certainly take you there.