"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
Industry Reviews
"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 "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, author of 1776, John Adams, and The Wright Brothers
"One of the 25 Best Books of the Year." -The New York Public Library
"A subject as mighty and tragic as this deserves an excellent biographer, and in Mark Kurlansky, cod has found one. Beautifully written and elegantly illustrated . . . Kurlansky's marvelous fish opus stands as a reminder of what good non-fiction used to be: eloquent, learned, and full of earthy narratives that delight and appall." -The Globe and Mail
"In the end the book stands as a kind of elegy, a loving eulogy not only to a fish, but to the people whose lives have been shaped by the habits of the fish, and whose way of life is now at an end." -Newsday
"What a prodigious creature is the cod. Kurlansky's approach is intriguing - and deceptively whimsical. This little book is a work of no small consequence." -Business Week
"In the story of the cod, Mark Kurlansky has found the tragic fable of our age - abundance turned to scarcity through determined shortsightedness. This classic history will stand as an epitaph and a warning." -Bill McKibben
