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But a full length book. It would have made an interesting magazine article. Umm, no. I didn't like this book at all. It was sooo boring.
History is all about contingencies. Peppered throughout are interesting facts and interpretations, such as the notion that the Basques were routinely fishing off Newfoundland long before Columbus made his first voyage. Mark Kurlansky has given us a fine example of this genre with Cod (as he apparently did earlier with Salt, which I have not read).Whether the cod was "the fish that changed the world" is beside the point. He is a fine writer, and he has mustered an excellent history of the fish, the North Atlantic fisheries, and the fishermen, merchants, and monarchs who earned their livings and built their empires around and upon it.
For example, the fishermen of Gloucester are experimenting with the notion of community-supported fisheries (like community-supported agriculture), which may provide a better economic model for depressed fisheries. It even has recipes.I will offer two caveats. Amazingly, Cod does not. If you read Cod, take a few minutes when you finish to bring yourself up to date. So despite the fact that I have just finished reading 275 pages on cod fishing, if you sat me down, showed me a map of the North Atlantic, and asked me to point out the locations of the Grand Banks and the Georges Bank, I couldn't do it.Secondly, the book was published in 1997 and this comment in 2010, so recent developments in our understanding and management of fisheries are obviously absent. So it is not unusual for a historian to argue backwards and make a reasonable claim that "X was crucial and changed the course of history," where X can be almost any fact, event, or thing.
First, any history book with an expansive geographic scope should include maps. Perhaps things are not quite so bleak. Kurlansky deploys the formula skillfully. And he is relentless in documenting the ignorance and callousness that led to the collapse of one of the ocean's great resources.
Sound familiar. Who would think a mundane topic about Cod Fish would be so interesting and thought provoking. I highly recommend the book. Not only does it provide intriguing insight, it addresses the important issue as to how we impact our planet. This book address how a simple yet important food source has impacted our diet, cultural development, historical expansion, economic development, and the environment. All from a lackluster, bland tasting fish that has unfortunately been hunted to near extinction.
After a few pages, I was hooked. There are already 128 reviews of this book on Amazon, so if you've been reading them, by now you've probably haddock and have tunaed out. If you are keen to know about a single species of fish in history, you could read this book, or you could read it just for the halibut. When did they start coming. It once smelt of drying cod, but the dangerous life on the Grand Banks, as described in the book, came to an end after a terrible storm in 1846. I can report that it's a most interesting book that traces cod's part in Western history from early times.
But I've been herring a good time (both reading and whiting) and heartily recommend COD to you. I was floundering around, trying to decide what to read next. I spotted Mark Kurlansky's book on my shelf and realized it had been sitting there since 1997. I was also glad to see that my hometown, Marblehead, Mass., once a major fishing port, rated a few mentions.
The scale of the population crash is greater than I thought and cod may very well go the way of the dodo. There is no use carping about this, we've wantonly wasted this once-inexhaustible resource, thinking that such dace would never come. The sections on the nexus of cod, molasses and slavery impressed me, and the reason why stockfish/salt cod is still a part of Caribbean and West African life becomes clear.
COD is a very enjoyable book, with a lot of well-researched chapters which are well-written up. Nobody knows, but for those partisans of Chris Columbus, this will be a most sharking piece of information. I enjoyed reading the big grouper of recipes provided in between chapters and at the end, with very interesting information to go along with them, but can only conclude that if you try certain ones, you will wind up quite eel. "Holy mackerel", I thought, "I should have read that before now." I took it down, perched on my favorite char, and shad all my inhibitions about reading books on fish.
Nearby Gloucester has carried on to the bitter end. We can say that short sighted policies have scrod them. When the Italian John Cabot `discovered' Newfoundland, he found a thousand Basque fishing vessels already there. Kurlansky exsalmons many aspects of the cod fisheries in the North Sea, off Iceland, and on the Grand Banks of North America, shedding a ray of light on why overfishing has put most fishermen out of business.
An amazing story, brilliantly told, with a lesson for the entire human race. This bio on codfish has changed how I look at what's on my plate.
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