His entry begins:All my life I’ve been a step behind. That’s given me a perspective from the tail-end of the crowd. Late in life and true to form, I’ve developed a passion for writing. Since I’m a novice writer without an MFA, I’ve played catch-up by taking some writing classes. It’s helpful to read your instructor’s work before you take a class. Or, if you are like me, you get insight by reading their book after the parade has passed by. Here are three books on my coffee table from teachers of my writing classes, and a couple other books I’ve read recently.About Billion-Dollar Fish, from the publisher:
Chris Cokinos, The Fallen Sky. Chris taught at the Wildbranch Workshop sponsored by Orion Magazine. His book is a masterful braiding of astronomy with stories of obsession and memoir. He writes of the compulsion of meteor hunters and also about his own preoccupation with learning their stories, and the deeply personal consequences of...[read on]
Alaska pollock is everywhere. If you’re eating fish but you don’t know what kind it is, it’s almost certainly pollock. Prized for its generic fish taste, pollock masquerades as crab meat in california rolls and seafood salads, and it feeds millions as fish sticks in school cafeterias and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches at McDonald’s. That ubiquity has made pollock the most lucrative fish harvest in America—the fishery in the United States alone has an annual value of over one billion dollars. But even as the money rolls in, pollock is in trouble: in the last few years, the pollock population has declined by more than half, and some scientists are predicting the fishery’s eventual collapse.Learn more about the book and author at Kevin M. Bailey's website.
In Billion-Dollar Fish, Kevin M. Bailey combines his years of firsthand pollock research with a remarkable talent for storytelling to offer the first natural history of Alaska pollock. Crucial to understanding the pollock fishery, he shows, is recognizing what aspects of its natural history make pollock so very desirable to fish, while at the same time making it resilient, yet highly vulnerable to overfishing. Bailey delves into the science, politics, andeconomics surrounding Alaska pollock in the Bering Sea, detailing the development of the fishery, the various political machinations that have led to its current management, and, perhaps most important, its impending demise. He approaches his subject from multiple angles, bringing in the perspectives of fishermen, politicians, environmentalists, and biologists, and drawing on revealing interviews with players who range from Greenpeace activists to fishing industry lawyers.
Seamlessly weaving the biology and ecology of pollock with the history and politics of the fishery, as well as Bailey’s own often raucous tales about life at sea, Billion-Dollar Fish is a book for every person interested in the troubled relationship between fish and humans, from the depths of the sea to the dinner plate.
Writers Read: Kevin M. Bailey.
--Marshal Zeringue
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