Nancy Lord writes like an angel about the hard, often lonely, and always rewarding work of fishing along an agate-strewn Alaskan inlet, where she and her partner do what she calls the "sustaining work" of landing evasive salmon far less efficiently than do the neighborhood grizzly bears. That sustaining work grows ever more difficult, she writes, as it becomes more unusual for individual fishers to market their goods in the Lower 48, the province of large-scale food distributors and of the "pale imitation that packages well." Reading this lovely book may well make you hungry--and not a little envious of Lord, who seems to have found a little corner of paradise in the backwoods of the far north.