The Last Fish Tale
Where to buy The Last Fish Tale books online?
Product Description
“A marvelous, compelling tale”(Rocky Mountain News) from the New York Times bestselling leader of Salt and Cod.
Gloucester, Massachusetts, America’s oldest fishing port, is defined by the culture of commercial fishing. But the threat of over-fishing, combined with climate change and pollution, is endangering a way of life, not only in Gloucester but in coastal cities all over the world. And yet, according to Kurlansky, it doesn’t have to be this way. Engagingly written and filled with rich history, tasty anecdotes, colorful characters, and local recipes, The Last Fish Tale is Kurlansky’s most urgent tale, “an engrossing multi-layered portrait of a fishing community that can be read for pure pleasure as well as being a campaigning plea for the environment” (Financial Times).
Buy Cheap The Last Fish Tale Online
Related posts:
Similiar in scenery to his “The Huge Oyster,” this book recounts the glory days and tragic demise of the succulent and valuable cod fish. I was very grieved over this ecological and economic disaster, brought on as usual, by human greed and thoughlessness.
Now of course, I can’t go to the fish market lacking feeling guilt which is terrible since he gives the reader wonderous Early American recipes for stews, cheeks, and the wonderful salted cod dishes indigenous to Brazilians, Basques and Africans who have loved this trade fish for centuries.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This guy can’t write a terrible book…..Cod, Salt, The Huge Oyster and now this….a fantastic run of writing for Mr. Kurlansky
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Do people in Gloucester run around adage, “That’s Gloucester” whenever something the least bit provocative or odd happens as Mark Kurlanksy says they do in his, moving and rambling The Last Fish Tale to which he adds the sub-title ” The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival of Gloucester, America’s Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town.” Maybe so, but I doubt it. Indeed, the adage reminds me of an equivalent adage — “That’s Bisbee” — in Richard Shelton’s Come Back to Bisbee (1992). The history, situation and future of the ex- copper mining town of Bisbee, Arizona parallel that of Gloucester, In this case, but, the town in question is an inland town surrounded by copper-toned hills a fleeting distance from the life-threatening and life-giving Mexican border. Kurlansky’s book cannot, but, be dismissed lightly for while some of his statements are exaggerated or veer toward the ridiculous, they are also provocative because they challenge readers, particularly readers who have lived in Gloucester, to weigh them carefully, in which case there is enough substance in them to provide nourishment of an ample, digestive character. (Digestion, or the culinary part of it, is a prominent sub-theme in the book.)
During the Depression years when I grew up at the very edge of a damp, foul and smelly Gloucester inner- harbor before the Fish Pier, built in 1938, obliterated Five-Pound Island, I was aware of a “Gloucester spirit.” Part of this had to do with the fact that within my own family tree and within the families of my neighbors there were direct ties to the sea and to fishing and to the knowledge that came from experiencing the loss of people who had drowned while wresting for their’s and their families livelihoods from the tumultuous and, treacherous sea. But death is a fact of life, whether on land or sea, in the ocean, in the mines, in bed, or in the trenches.
As in so many towns in the United States, the “Gloucester spirit” had a lot to do with the feats of local high school football, baseball, and basketball players. (In the 1940’s it was mainly football) It was these players who were, for a season at least, the city’s heroes. But regardless of whatever was first in public conversation or in newspapers, the fickle and haunting presence of the sea was permanently in peoples’ minds, shaping their thoughts and fears and hopes. More than Lord Byron and Walt Whitman, who were fascinated by the sea’s tidal comings and goings, the poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling, in his book Captains Courageous, sensed the challenge and the response the sea evoked. Kipling’s tribute to manliness and egalitarianism was in the “Gloucester Spirit.” In as much, as people need art to know themselves, Kipling gave them what they needed. Additional artists also expressed the “Gloucester sprit,” most notably the sculptor Leonard Craske who gave Gloucester its most well-known icon, the Man at the Veer who looks steadfastly out to the ocean and steers his and mankind’s ship into the unknown and infinitesimal beyond.. In recent years, poets Charles Olson, in an obtuse (he would say “archaeological”) fashion, and Vincent Ferrini in a more down- to the-water manner have kept the “Gloucester spirit” alive.
The painter Fitz Hugh Lane was a native son of Gloucester who bought fame outside the city. His paintings are best seen on walls rather than in books as they do not reproduce well. The settings tend to be placid and, carefully composed, though there are exceptions in which brigs, schooners and yachts appear to be responding to wind and wave. Unlike Fitz Hugh Lane, artist Winslow Homer was not a native son; yet he sensed the drama of the ocean and of fishing in a more intense manner than Fitz Hugh Lane. (Somewhere Charles Olson, Gloucester’s best-known if not best poet, takes an opposite point of view.) Ironically, Homer’s dynamic paintings of waves crashing against rocks were not painted in Bass Rocks, Gloucester, but in his family tree’s compound at Prout’s Neck, Maine. But summer people in Gloucester, like Winslow Homer and the young poet T. S. Eliot, were, in the main, interlopers. A few were so insulated by their money and taste that they contacted local people only when they were buying goods at local stores. The exceptions were beachgoers, in Excellent Harbor and Niles Beaches in Gloucester, where interchanges took place between young summer people — principally girls — and local Lotharios.
Summer was an exciting time in Gloucester for families, who, having been isolated by cold and inhospitable winters, establish an exhilarating opportunity for social interaction. A similar person-to-person interchange occurred in public schools where the mingling of so many ethnic groups fostered assimilation even while parents of the students — immigrants from Greece, Italy, the Ukraine, France, Nova Scotia and elsewhere — fought against it.
All generalizations are incorrect, but, at the risk of being incorrect, I maintain Portuguese who lived on “Portagee Hill” were the first twentieth-century ethnic group to assimilate.. After the third generation, many descendants could not speak Portuguese. Sicilians and Jews maintained their insularity for longer periods. Here again in third and subsequent generations divisions had softened but had not altogether disappeared. It is comforting to know that Gloucester people, from whatever stock they came, have adhered to and perpetuated their heritages.
Sunday has permanently been an vital day in Gloucester for it meant a relief from the toils of additional days, and, as with the beaches and summer, an opportunity to meet others, even if worship of God was the ostensible reason for the getting-together. Insular and provincial as local people may have been, there was a sense of pride in being part of a community. Even while this community had its minorities, these divisions were regularly complementary and inter-dependent.
When Kurlansky is not giving recipes of dishes which people in Gloucester made from scratch with whatever was available — mostly fish — he recites a upsetting tale of the dangers of fishing. . Much of what he has to say is well-known due to similar re-counting by Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm and accounts in the media of disappearing fish, It’s a distressing tale, but , whether or not individually shocking, depends on how it affects one’s family tree and one’s people nutrionally and financially. On a broader scale, the extinction of predatory fish from the ocean — sharks, tuna, swordfish, marlin, skim, flounder, halibut, and cod — allows tiny plankton-eating fish, such as anchovies, herring and mackerel, to expand, destroys an existing ecosystem, and deprives patrons of protein, a building block of life.
To say that Gloucester is changing does not make it special, nor does it make it “America’s Most Original Town.” This is Kurlansky’s greatest solipsism. Nevertheless Gloucester exerts an appeal on residents and visitors that is only partially shared by additional coastal communities like Boothbay Harbor, Boston, New Bedford, Nantucket, Monterey and San Diego. Kurlansky devotes his next-to-last chapter to trying to place the microcosm Gloucester within a greater macrocosm. He makes comparisons and relations with conditions and metropolises in Canada and Europe. He establish the Cornish fishing village of Newlyn to be the most like Gloucester, not only in its “pictorial” blue-collar character, but in its coping with problems caused by over-fishing and the institution of governmental quotas. In recent years Newlyn has become a major supply source for fish and shell species for the rest of Europe and, to date has held the encroachments of tourism and non-fish related industries at bay.
This placing of Gloucester’s concerns in a larger context provides a helpful service for Gloucester is an island in only a metaphorical sense. The fish it ships, once caught in large and now in tiny quantities, went out to markets all over the world. Even Charles Olson, the alien tenant in Gloucester’s cheap-rent Fort district, knew that Gloucester included the mainland. The polis he admired had both metropolitan and metaphysical dimensions. Olson praised the settlers on the land that they called Cape Ann in 1623. Unlike the pilgrims who came to the New World to serve God and themselves, the practical-minded White Anglo Saxon settlers of Gloucester came together to form a cooperative and self-sufficient community. In a sense, “that is Gloucester” today as it is in so many cities in the United States who have not altogether lost their lead the way moorings and who have not become suburbs of a sprawling megalopolis.
More people place Gloucester than stay. Each high school class produces a crop of expatriates. Some of these wipe the soil of Gloucester from their feet and the spray from their skins.. A few look back disdainfully at the dirt and dirt of their grubbing pinch-penny town. These escapees come from the poorer classes who did the menial and backbreaking work on the wharves and in the canneries that kept the collars of so many better-paid and educated people clean. One of the many fascinating tidbits gleaned from reading Kurlansky, is the notion that fishermen who courageous the Stellwagen, Georges and Grand Banks delight in fishing and find additional occupations “dull.” I know of a schoolmate who, upon being resuced from the sea after the boat he was on sank, gave up commercial fishing for a more secure craft on land (a vocaton he had bought courtesy of Glouester High School.) My brother-in-law, a tuna fisherman in Gloucester and San Diego, took classes in chemestry at a Community Colllege, with the result that he secured a job in a defense industry. HIs life thereafter was insulated from prospects of phycial maiming and from fears that his “stake” would not be enough to support his family tree. When I worked on the Gloucester wharves in 1942, my foreman encouraged me to take nightly classes in Boston so that I would not be chained to a life of inconceivable drudgery. Sebastian Junger mentions the alcoholism, the caterwauling and one-night sex. Neither he nor Korlansky mentioned the high incidence gf mental illness among misfits and rejects.
In the 1930’s and 40’s fishing Captain Ben Pine and supporter Roger Babson were Gloucester’s most legendary citizens. Its all-time hero was, but, Howard Blackburn, a doryman from Nova Scotia, who in 1883, while lost in a fog rowed his dory one-hundred miles from the Burego Bank to the shores of Newfoundland, his fingers, which he lost, being frozen to the oars. A living legend, in 1901 Blackburn, his arms changed to stumps, sailed in a specially designed sloop from Gloucester to Lisbon in thirty-nine record days. As time is not static others names are now or will be added to the list of luminaries.
Among all of Gloucester’s re-settled and re-located people, there is something about roots. As Sicilians at the Fort remember Sicily, as the Portuguese on the “Hill” remember the Azores, as Jews remember the Ukraine, so ex- Gloucesterites look back on their native city as a collage of scenes — from Stage Fort Park, from Bass Rocks, from Eastern Point, from Rockport, from Annisquam, etc. — Gloucester is a place its distant children return to in memory, if not in fact – a city of contrasts and conflicts, of meager resources and occasional animosities, but also a city that has grown from its soil and waters, from its rocks and trees and shrubs, from its local animal and close by water life and has so ramified that it has become a beacon of courage and like. It is these positive attributes that Kurlansky establish in his interviews with Jews, Italians, Portuguese and Wasps and, as in my case, French Canadians. I heartily recommend The Last Fish Tale as a primer that presents most of the facts one needs to know to start to know the reason why Gloucester has maintained a steady and now worrisome place in the imagination of the American people and why it has become the source of so much poetic and pictorial description and praise.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Walking the fine line between persons who want to preserve the renowned fishing industry of Gloucester, Massachusetts, long into the future and persons who see that industry as already nearly dead, NY Times reporter Mark Kurlansky examines the history of the community, its ties to the sea, and its very uncertain economic future. At the same time, he also worries about the future of the Atlantic Ocean itself as a resource, one now so endangered that unless the federal government institutes “overall eco-system management,” and not just quotas on point catches, it will soon die. The government has wasted too much time on fleeting-term “remedies,” he believes, and has done no comprehensive long-term preparation for the eco-system on which the industry depends. Ultimately, the “scientists” reliable for the health of our ocean have made too many mistakes, and fishermen in Gloucester and elsewhere are paying the fee.
Kurlansky describes Gloucester (pronounced “GLOSS-ter”) from its earliest discoveries by the Vikings to its first settlements, emphasizing its colonial fishing industry, a time in which people would routinely catch cod that were four or five feet long and halibut weighing 200 – 400 pounds. Between colonial times and 1991, when the unexpected Perfect Storm struck, the city has lost six thousand Gloucester fishermen and many hundreds of vessels at sea, yet the fishing industry persists. The evolution of large trawlers and draggers, and the arrival of mammoth ships from Japan and Russia to fish just offshore, led the local industry to try to protect itself by getting exclusive fishing zones and the two-hundred mile limit customary, but “[nonstop] stern dragging has endangered two-thirds of the world’s fish stocks,” and the prospects for the future look bleak.
Waves of Jewish, Sicilian, and Portuguese immigrants have kept the city socially vibrant, and the fishing boats filled with willing workers. Their cultural contributions and festivals, especially St. Peter’s Fiesta in July, described in detail here, are part of the fabric of society and a fully-attended joy for the entire community. The city also has a long history as an art colony, with Fitz Hugh (Henry) Lane, Winslow Homer, William Morris Hunt, Childe Hassam, John Henry Twachtman, Emile Gruppe, and even Edward Hopper taking advantage of the special light reflected off the sea to give shine to their paintings. T. S. Eliot vacationed in Gloucester, Rudyard Kipling wrote Captains Courageous while living in Gloucester, and NY playwright Israel Horovitz has produced his plays in Gloucester for nearly forty years.
Still, the community sees itself nearly exclusively as a fishing port and wants to remain one. In the 1980s, the fishing community convinced the city to zone the entire waterfront for commercial maritime activities only. “Someday fishing will improve,” they judge, and then they will have the land they need to expand. “Otherwise it will turn into Newport.” With these zoning regulations in place, there’s no possibility that that will take place or that tourism will become an industry to fill the economic gap left by the decimated fishing industry. There are no docking facilities for pleasure boats, and the wide waterfront is a frail wasteland with no new building and no hotel. In 2008, the battle continues to rage between the “preservationists” who want to preserve the fishing industry and its control of the waterfront and persons who judge that a mixture of uses might better serve both the community and the economy. So far the fishermen are hanging tough, hoping for a renewal of their fishing stocks. n Mary Whipple
Bear of the Sea : Giant Jim Pattillo and the Roaring Years of the Gloucester-Nova Scotia Fishery by Joe Garland
North Shore Fish by Israel Horovitz
North Shore Fish, film with Tony Danza
Captains Courageous, with Lionel Barrymore, Spencer Tracy
The Perfect Storm [Blu-ray] with George Clooney
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
The leader, in writing about the history of Gloucester, captures the feel of the city and its inhabitants well. Beginning with the discovery of the town, and progressing through the history, the leader demonstrates well some of the ups and downs that have occurred in Cape Ann over the past several centuries.
From the history of the city, the leader slips gently into the reasons that fish stocks are declining and discusses the animosity establish between government regulators and the people who earn a living fishing. While not detailed, it does present an simple to know look at the problems linked with fish stock management.
In addition, the book compares similar towns in additional countries to allow the reader to realize that this is not a problem that exists strictly within the northeast part of the US or with a single port. He also examines the effect of tourism on the towns and the problems tourism can make in effective fishing villages.
This book is a excellent all-purpose look at the history of Gloucester, as well as fish reduction. It is a recommended read to anyone who is interested in the life style in a fishing community as well as how the fishing industry is in distress.
For people who are interested in more detail on the plight of the New England fish stocks, and the views of both government regulators and the fishermen, I would highly recommend “The Fantastic Gulf: Fishermen, Scientists, and the Struggle to Revive the World’s Greatest Fishery by David Dobbs. It is a detailed look at the problems from both sides and goes into detail on the theme.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5