David Ladensohn

Meet the Author

David Ladensohn

After growing up in San Antonio and graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, David Ladensohn became an international banker, living in San Francisco, Seoul, Korea, Hong Kong, Houston, and Los Angeles.

He then spent 21 years managing a manufacturing company in San Antonio, where he retired as CEO. Ladensohn trained as a mediator and today specializes in resolving family business disputes. He started and manages two water rights investment funds, and recently served ten years on a Texas bank’s board of directors, eventually serving as chairman. Today he is vice-chairman of the nation’s largest wholesale grocer, one of the ten largest private companies in the United States.

Ladensohn is curious about many subjects, including the nature of time, the role of music in evolution, the vagaries of history, and which of our modern beliefs will prove laughable 100 years from now. Fly-fishing is his passion, combining outdoor beauty, catch-and-release of wild animals, solitude, travel, puzzles and mysteries, and skills that are never perfected. A lifelong learner, Ladensohn has completed business and mediation programs at Harvard Business and Law Schools and recently spent six months completing a course of study at Oxford.

Ladensohn and his wife of 50 years live primarily in the mountains of far northern New Mexico and in San Antonio. Their daughter is a professional photographer in Los Angeles.

Now Available

Fly-Fishing with Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with water. The famed Italian Renaissance artist meticulously studied and drew every aspect of rivers, from the nature of water drops to the ways currents create and destroy the earth’s surface. His obsession led him to become a professional hydraulic engineer. He changed his mind on Aristotle’s 1,800-year-old theory of the water cycle and, through logic, came to believe in the one we use today. He discovered the nature of erosion and heretically disproved the biblical flood. He created beautiful maps and drawings of river currents and developed an audacious plan to reroute the Arno River for war and peace.

It is obvious to David Ladensohn, who has been fly-fishing for forty years, that Leonardo da Vinci would have made the perfect fishing guide. The artist’s keen sense of humor and winning personality would have made him a wonderful companion. He knew more about how rivers work than any person before him and would have been outstanding at reading the water to figure out where the fish are. Beginning with Leonardo’s remarkable biography—from illegitimate child to celebrity whose company was sought by competing rulers in Italy and France—and taking readers through the inspirations that led him to fall in love with waterways, Ladensohn makes the connection between the artist’s life and the author’s deep knowledge of the art of fly-fishing. His adventures have led him to seek out unique and storied fly-fishing locales around the world, including Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Bhutan, Italy, Slovenia, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, Costa Rica, The Bahamas, Ireland, England, and Mongolia.

Ladensohn’s research on Leonardo da Vinci led him to the artist’s native rivers in Italy, scholars at Oxford, and the inside of Windsor Castle, where he studied the finest of the artist’s original water drawings. Those drawings, which remain little-known even today, are reproduced here in color, some for the first time. Fly-Fishing with Leonardo da Vinci is meant to inform and entertain anyone interested in the artist or fly-fishing and their unlikely intersection.

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