Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
Binding: Audiobook Cassette
Publisher: New Millennium Press
Date Published: 06/2002
ISBN-13:9781590072455ISBN:1590072456
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. 6 cassettes. read more
"Mark Kurlansky is currently a New Yorker who worked for several years as a doc worker, as a doc worker, and as a cook and pastry chef. His degree was in theater, but he turned to journalism not long after graduating. His journalistic resume boasts of a number of different books, magazine contributions and papers articles published around the world. He's received numerous rewards for his exceptional narration, philosophical substance and tongue-in-cheek observations of the global evolution of fishing. I agree with one of these things; He does, in fact, talk about the global evolution of fishing.
Any fish enthusiast around the world could easily find their attachment to Mr. Kurlansky's book. Included in his number of geographical mentions are New England and the US in general, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Canada in general, Latin America and the Americas in general, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Holland and the Netherlands in general, Scotland and Britain in general, France, Belgium, Portugal and Spain, West Africa, Japan and Asia in general ... Almost anyone, regardless of their country of origin, could find a connection with this book... so long as they are really, really, really a die hard, relentless fan of... cod. And who of us isn't?
Mr. Kurlansky knows his literature, music, newspaper headlines and extremely old school cookbooks, as he takes quotes and recipes from these sources and makes these the introduction to every chapter. Occasionally, he throws a fish ball or fish head recipe or three in the middle of the chapter, just in case we were bored of reading his endless facts about fish and the progressive methods in which they've been caught.
This is not your typical book. There is no love affair, no resolution, and no story line. While Kurlansky does attempt to walk you through the history of fishing, he occasionally jumps years, so it's difficult to say that the book even follows a strict chronological order. While you can predict that you will be taken from early 1900's to late 1900's, there's nothing that stops him from taking you from 1960 back to 1940 and on to 1980. Instead of a story, this book is 276 pages of facts. The only tale that is spoken of here is the kind that gets thrown in bouillabaisse. However, if you are preparing to be a contender on Jeopardy, this is definitely a helpful
For a history buff, particularly that who has an interest in maritime and or the discovery of new countries, this is a great book. It's also a great book for anyone who has ever been curious about the method of trawling, or what vegetable should be served with fish tongue. Since I often lie in bed awake at night pondering the correlation between fish and the French and Indian war, and why I always have to ask for the mysteriously fluctuating "market price", the fishy facts that I have learned from reading "Cod" have helped me sleep better at night.
For those who have not had a chance to read this, I've decided to condense the part two of this uniquely structured book (with three parts and one part cookbook at the end) From page 112-125, this is, with the exception of small words and repetitive sentences, what a reader would expect to hear.
There are harsh conditions of icy water. Fishermen commonly lose fingers from frostbite, line snags or machinery. A fisherman is forced into retirement when he looses too many fingers. Fishermen have a sense of the elite brotherhood "like combat veterans." No Social benefits go to fisherman; as they are self-employed, struggle economically. The max age for fisherman is typically 50. The number of Gloucester fisherman lost at sea between 1830 an d1900 was 3800, 70 percent grater than all American casualties in the war of 1812. Many vessels are lost by high winds and large waves. Fishermen have the highest fatal accident rate of any type of worker in North Atlantic countries. The Canadian and French have an agenda to get government to financially support their fishing industry. Explanation of a gill net's look and function the stream engine, once seized would be the first new idea to dramatically change fishing since the discovery of North America. Once frozen food idea came along, the entire nature of commercial fishing would change.
Environmental tragedy and impending sense of doom due to the evolution of industry and nations at war for over fished cod is the tone that the book ended on. For instance, Kurlansky tells of the financial hardship of his former industry.
"In 1989, a study by the UN food and Agricultural organization estimated that it costs $92b to operate global fishing. Revenue was only $72b."
Kurlansky also tells us that out of work fisherman resort to becoming the skippers of tourism what watching boats, which is apparently a huge insult and swallowing of pride to the men who once risked their lives at sea. These statements are meant to encourage to evoke sympathy for these men and their line of work in the reader. While it is, in fact, difficult to see anyone have to take what they consider a downward move in their career, I imagine these moves are typical in any industry, and it's difficult for me to sympathize more with these characters than with anyone else who has ever been demoted or lost their job.
The best summary of this book is probably given in the quote Kurlansky uses on page 158 of his tribute to Cod. It is simply a quote from 20th century Icelandic novelist Halldor Laxness, who states, " Life is saltfish.""
"Parts of this book are fascinating, such as the role codfish played in the "molasses to rum to slaves" triangle trade. (It still boggles me that people in the Caribbean islands - which are surrounded by, you know, fish - imported dried salt cod from the North Atlantic. But apparently it was more cost effective to have every available hand working in the sugar cane fields rather than out fishing.) I also enjoyed hearing about the Cod Wars between Iceland and England, and how fish stocks rebounded during the World Wars, when motorized fishing vessels were diverted to military use.
But sometimes Kurlansky seems to think that having made his point one way, he needs to make it again, and again, and again. It would have been enough to tell us that Basques, Norwegians, and Puerto Ricans all have a similar codfish dish, rather than giving us the three recipes. (In fact, the recipes were by far the most tedious part of this book. Maybe they wouldn't have been so bad in the text version, but as audio, they can't be skimmed and are really boring.) The individual stories of modern fishermen got a bit dull as well.
Overall, though, this is a wonderful cautionary tale about those who would put economic interests ahead of environmental concerns. There's a definite parallel between the disappearance of fish stocks due to more efficient fishing methods, along with the protests of fishermen who don't have the capital to use those methods that they should not be restricted from fishing, and the acceleration of global climate change amid protests that carbon-emitting methods are necessary for economic viability, especially in emerging economies. But in the end, cod crashed hard despite eleventh-hour attempts to revive the fishery - and my fear is that history is going to repeat itself with the global climate."
"OK, here's the deal: this book got all sorts of praise for being so original and thought-provoking. Except, it's really not. Kurklansky is *hardly* the first person to point out that cod was central to the economy of early modern Europe and America or the first to point out how overfishing (particularly fishing techniques such as trawling) have had devastating environmental effects. Yet despite the fact that it clearly stands on the shoulders of generations of historians, the book has no footnotes and a very, very limited bibliography. I wouldn't let my students get away with a stunt like this, and I don't think that any author should receive the accolades that Kurklansky did for this work. It's an ok book, apart from that, although it's really not that smart. I gave it two stars because it does succeed -- moderately -- at reaching a wider audience than most historical works. But historians are the ones who did all of the hard archival work, translating, and interpreting than Kurklansky relies on, and he should have given them their due."
"I have read in my colonial history research about the plentiful schools of very large cod that were found along the New England coast in colonial times, and decided to see what else I could learn about the fisheries. This little book is well written and readable, with a section of cod recipes at the end of the book. (Many of these, like Fried Cod Head, or Stewed Codfish Tongues, seem to be of historical interest only.) Cod was dried and/or salted to preserve it through the winter months, and was pretty much a steady diet for people along the Canadian and New England coasts, as well as in Spain and Portugal. I also learned a lot about the fishing industry over the past fifty years, and the scarcity of many kinds of fish today because people did not heed warnings that the great plenty from the seas would not always continue. The practice of ground netting, which nets everything on the bottom of the sea and lets the fishermen discard any that are not wanted, is one reason for the great decline in stock. I was a little surprised that the fisheries on the Isles of Shoals in the 17th century were not mentioned."
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