Tigerfish! to Dodofish - Fishing on West Africa's Niger River, A Photo Journa

If you go to live on the Niger River in West Africa for two years, DON'T FORGET YOUR POLE! The author is a fish biologist with a keen interest in figuring out what the heck is going on. But things were rarely what he first thought... How do you land an electric fish, and what if you screw up? What happens when a cobra tries to get in the boat? Which one lure will catch tigerfish, Nile perch, catfish, Tilapia, etc? Where do you catch a tigerfish, and then how do you deal with its teeth? And what fish is going to kill you if you eat it? This is a story of fish, fishers, and fishing as experienced by the author and his wife during their two-year service as U.S. Peace Corps volunteers in Mali from 1992 to 1994, and during a return trip in 2005. This photo-journal contains 106 color pictures and 13,000 words. It opens with sport fishing, and details the author's pursuit of tigerfish, Nile perch, and other species including the dubious dodo. The second part is an account of experiences and observations made during the large community fishing events that take place in the waters of the floodplain during the dry season. You may have seen similar events on viral videos. But here you will find an explanation of what these events are really about. Some folks who comment on those videos should put their assumptions aside... The third section provides a brief description and numerous pictures of the life and work of small-scale commercial Somono fishers. The appendix contains links to the author's videos. (The photos are of varying quality. All are presented at the maximum file size allowed by Amazon. Some are nice crisp original digital images. Some are pretty good quality scans of slides. And some are kind of crappy, but serve well to illustrate the points in the writing. I'd say the pictures rate in quality somewhere between National Geographic and the Loch Ness Monster.)