Must-read Books on the Ocean Fisheries Whales & People of the Sea
Discover must-read books on ocean fisheries, whales, and maritime life—from *In the Heart of the Sea* and *Moby Dick* to *Cod* and *Gaff Topsails*.
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Gaff Topsails
by Patrick Kavanagh
In the literary tradition of "The Shipping News" and "The Bird Artist", this debut work evokes a world suffused with images and presences of spirits and saints, the drowned and the saved, during the Feast of St. John in 1948.
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In the Heart of the Sea
by Nathaniel Philbrick
From the author of Mayflower, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye--the riveting bestseller tells the story of the true events that inspired Melville's Moby-Dick. Winner of the National Book Award, Nathaniel Philbrick's book is a fantastic saga of survival and adventure, steeped in the lore of whaling, with deep resonance in American literature and history. In 1820, the whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale, leaving the desperate crew to drift for more than ninety days in three tiny boats. Nathaniel Philbrick uses little-known documents and vivid details about the Nantucket whaling tradition to reveal the chilling facts of this infamous maritime disaster. In the Heart of the Sea, recently adapted into a major feature film starring Chris Hemsworth, is a book for the ages.
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Cod
by Mark Kurlansky
“A charming fish tale and a pretty gift for your favorite seafood cook or fishing monomaniac. But in the last analysis, it’s a bitter ecological fable for our time.” –Los Angeles Times An unexpected, energetic look at world history via the humble cod fish from the bestselling author of Salt and The Basque History of the World Cod is the biography of a single species of fish, but it may as well be a world history with this humble fish as its recurring main character. Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod, frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again, sold salted by the Basques, an enigmatic people with a mysterious, unlimited supply of cod. As we make our way through the centuries of cod history, we also find a delicious legacy of recipes, and the tragic story of environmental failure, of depleted fishing stocks where once their numbers were legendary. In this lovely, thoughtful history, Mark Kurlansky ponders the question: Is the fish that changed the world forever changed by the world's folly? “Every once in a while a writer of particular skill takes a fresh, seemingly improbable idea and turns out a book of pure delight. Such is the case of Mark Kurlansky and the codfish.” –David McCullough
Book
Moby Dick, Or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
A young seaman joins the crew of the fanatical Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale Moby Dick.
