ACCOLADES & MEDIA COVERAGE  

 

Official Selection

“25 Best Fishing Books in Print” (out of 2400+ titles)

 

         

PanAngler Best Fishing Book of 1995

 

Tower Books’ Northwest Bestseller List  

First contemporary book to be excerpted in the scholarly journal of the American Museum of Fly Fishing

 Subject of over 40 major feature stories in such publications as

Dallas Morning News Ft. Worth Press-Telegram

Houston Chronicle Los Angeles Daily News New

Orleans Times Picayune Orange County Register Rocky Mountain News Salt Lake Tribune San

Jose Mercury News Seattle Post-Intelligencer St. Louis Post Dispatch St. Paul Pioneer Press St. Petersburg Times

Star Ledger South Florida Sun Sentinel

Tampa Tribune

Wall Street Journal On the water author profile

“We are two wild women drifting down a wild river, casting for wild trout....”  

Wisconsin Public Radio Author featured in a syndicated 20 minute interview,

as well numerous TV and over 100 radio interviews throughout the U.S.  

Chicago Tribune “Lyla Foggia’s informative, entertaining, beautifully packaged study not only shatters several long-held myths about women and fishing but also recommends the names

of several ‘reel women’ as ‘role models for the 1990s.’”  

Boston Globe “Both an excellent writer and angler, Foggia gives us a book full of real people and compelling sto-

ries. Yes, it’s about women, but forget those shrill, politically correct tomes you might expect. It’s none of that. Just really first-rate outdoors writing.”

 

USA Today Selected as a staff pick for holiday gifts 1995

 

Orange County Register “Lyla Foggia thought she was unique, being a female fisher. She had this great idea

to write a book teaching women how to enter what she had experienced as a male-dominated world. ‘Reel Women: The World of Women Who Fish’ is about as far from her

original book proposal as the Holiday Inn in Buena Park, where she sits at the end of a book tour, is from her riverbank home in Oregon….”

 

Rocky Mountain News “Rhonda Sapp was fishing a spot on the Platte River 11 years ago when two men walked up

behind her. “I heard one say to the other, ‘She’s standing where I wanted to be fishing,’ as though I wasn’t fishing, as though I was just standing there,” Sapp said. The men went upstream

and fished. They went downstream and fished. “They didn’t catch anything, and I continued to catch fish,” she said. The next morning the men came into the Colorado Angler, a

Lakewood fly fishing shop Sapp owns with her husband. They recognized her and asked what she had been using on the Platte. She ended up selling them a dozen flies. Women like Sapp

not only have a history of fishing, they have made fishing history. Lyla Foggia, a former Hollywood publicist, profiles dozens of them in her new book, Reel Women: The World of Women Who Fish. She focuses on trailblazers, the women who set records or otherwise

changed the face of the sport through their ingenuity and daring….”

 

Publisher’s Weekly Recommended for Mother’s Day 1996

Choice: Current Reviews For Academic Libraries “An excellent book for anyone interested in fishing and especially for women

who may be unaware of the rich legacy of women anglers.”  

Booknews “A loving tribute to the sport of fishing and the women who are passionate about it.”

 

Midwest Book Review “Engrossing insights”

 

San Diego Union-Tribune “One of [Foggia’s] first catches struck her the way a huge steelhead might startle her out of her waders on the Salmon River. Right there in a fishing encyclopedia was this: An English nun

and noblewoman, Dame Juliana Berners, wrote the first document on fishing and hunting. She had never heard or read that before.Following the Berners discovery, she found more gems,

like Chisie Farrington’s 1951 book, Women Can Fish, which she bought from a dealer in rare books. Foggia found photographs of petite women -- the Anglerettes, as they were called—from the 1930s and ‘40s standing next to 720-pound bluefin tuna and marlin. She suddenly realized

that good, interesting stories of women fishing likely were scattered all over the map, a giant anthology of tales and anecdotes and pictures. ‘It was a giant jigsaw puzzle, and all I needed

was a way to put them together,’ she said….”  

Denver Post “If you go to your favorite fishing hole next spring and find a woman in the middle of it, blame it on Lyla Foggia. Or, better yet, thank her for it. With her new book, Reel Women, The World of

Women Who Fish, the Oregon resident may have launched a tide that will do for angling by women what A River Runs Through It did for flyfishing.”

 

Buffalo News “Reel Women is a keeper….A volume filled with delightful surprises…This is fascinating read,

regardless of your gender -- perhaps the most interesting fishing book of 1995.”  

Tucson Citizen “Considering that Dame Juliana wrote the first published treatise on fishing in the Boke of St. Albans 80 years before Columbus reached North America and long before Columbus

reached North America and long before Izaak Walton got around to his classic, The Compleat Angler, Reel Women is about 550 years overdue.”

 

Journal of Sport History “Frequently cultural historians and sport historians will encounter books written for general

appeal that have the ability to prompt significant new issues and scholarly exploration in their fields. This is certainly the case with Lyla Foggia’s Reel Women: The World of Women Who Fish,

a collection of short biographies of women involved in just practically every dimension of sport fishing. Foggia’s approach is both historical and ethnographic….”

Excerpts from

REEL WOMEN by Lyla Foggia

which quantifiable surveys have been taken. 2 If we have under­

estimated their participation, it is perhaps a result of two key

factors: as late as the 1960s, many states did not require women

to buy a fishing license,3 and even today, few states ask for an

angler 's gender on the form that is filled out at the point of pur­

chase for either an annual or temporary license.

Also perplexing is the prevailing myth that men want to

keep the sport of fishing all to themselves. Of course, there will

always be those for whom the sport is as much an escape from

"the little woman" as a chance to spend time exclusively in the

company of men. But it can be assumed that most of the millions

of women who fish do so with their husbands or other male

loved ones, since women are rarely observed on the water in

groups of two or more without a man present, unless in a tour­

nament or learning situation. But the president of a large angling

organization says that the male members who have wives or girl­

friends as fishing companions are treated with special envy and

respect by the rest of the membership. Perhaps this book will aid

their efforts to entice their female loved ones into a sport that

has served as the primary bond in many of the relationships rep­

resented in this book.

The year 1996 is a watershed for women in angling. First

and foremost, it is the SOOth anniversary of the publication of

Dame Juliana's phenomenally astute treatise on fishing of 1496.

Equally worthy of recognition is the 20th anniversary of the

inception of Bass'n Gal in 1976 as well as the 40th anniversary of

the founding of the International Women's Fishing Association in

1955. Indeed, these three events, along with every other imprint

left by women over the last five centuries, is a testament to the

fact that women have a legacy in angling.

May this book help change how we perceive women-and

the sport - forever.

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