Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World - Softcover

Kurlansky, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140275010 ISBN 13: 9780140275018

Publisher: Penguin, 1998

Synopsis

294pp , in English , with many recipes on how to cook cod worldwide .. ABOUT THE AUTHOR :: Mark Kurlansky born in Hartford , Connecticut. After receiving a BA in Theatre from Butler University in 1970 , and refuse to serve in the army , Kurlansky worked in New York as a playwright , which has several off-off Broadway productions, and as a playwright in residence at Brooklyn College. He won the 1972 award for Earplay radio play better year. He worked many jobs, including as a commercial fisherman , a longshoreman , a paralegal , a cook and a pastry chef . In mid- 1970 , dissatisfied with the theater director in New York was taking , he turned to journalism, an early interest - who was editor of his high school newspaper . From 1976-1991 he worked as a foreign correspondent for The International Herald Tribune , The Chicago Tribune , The Miami Herald , The Philadelphia Inquirer. Headquartered in Paris and Mexico later reported on Europe, West Africa , Southeast Asia , Central America, Latin America and the Caribbean. His articles have appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines , including The International Herald Tribune , The Philadelphia Inquirer , The Miami Herald , The Chicago Tribune , Los Angeles Times , Time Magazine, Partisan Review, Harper , New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Audubon magazine , Food & Wine, Gourmet, Bon Apetit and Parade. In addition to numerous guest lectures at Columbia University School of Journalism at the University of Yale , Colby College, Grinnell College, the University of Dayton and several other schools , he has taught a class in creative writing two weeks in Assisi , Italy, non -fiction intensive workshop in Devon , England Foundation for the Arvon week , and has been invited lectures worldwide in history , writing , environment , and other issues. In the spring of 2007 was the Harman writer in residence at Baruch College teaching a fourteen -week honors course entitled " Journalism and literary imagination " . His books hav

About this title

Product Description:

"Cod" spans a thousand years and four continents. From the Vikings, who pursued the codfish across the Atlantic, and the enigmatic Basques, who first commercialized it in medieval times, to Bartholomew Gosnold, who named Cape Cod in 1602, and Clarence Birdseye, who founded an industry on frozen cod in the 1930s, Mark Kurlansky introduces the explorers, merchants, writers, chefs, and of course the fishermen, whose lives have interwoven with this prolific fish. He chronicles the fifteenth-century politics of the Hanseatic League and the cod wars of the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. He embellishes his story with gastronomic detail, blending in recipes and lore from the Middle Ages to the present. And he brings to life the cod itself: its personality, habits, extended family, and ultimately the tragedy of how the most profitable fish in history is today faced with extinction. From fishing ports in New England and Newfoundland to coastal skiffs, schooners, and factory ships across the Atlantic; from Iceland and Scandinavia to the coasts of England, Brazil, and West Africa, Mark Kurlansky tells a story that brings world history and human passions into captivating focus.

Review:

To make the history of a fish interesting, invigorating and moving is an almost impossible feat that Mark Kurlansky accomplishes fantastically well in this compact, learned, beautifully written gem of a book. Cod traces humankind's involvement with what was once one of the world's most plentiful foodstuffs. The Basque people, who Kurlansky suggests found America before Columbus, could only fish and forage (for whale meat) as far as they did because of the huge schools of cod they found, caught and salted as they went. Centuries before this Vikings had travelled from Norway across to Canada--the exact range of the Atlantic cod. Interspersed with old and forgotten recipes Cod becomes a fitting requiem to a fish no-one believed would ever become scarce nor become such a telling metaphor for our careless treatment of the sea, its bounty and our wider environment. --Mark Thwaite

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0140275010
• ISBN 13: 9780140275018
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304