Customer Reviews

Lament for an Ocean: The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fishery, A True Crime Story

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This book held my interest throughout and carefully depicts the events that led to one of the biggest failures of fisheries management ever. The book shows how failure to protect the biological resource resulted in tremendous economic and social loss in eastern Canada. While the book is somewhat repetitious, it should be of interest to those involved in fisheries management and those who care about protecting the resources of our oceans. The chapter on the Alaska-Canada salmon wars would be disputed by many Alaskan scientists, but the analogy that people forgot about the fish still rings true.

This is certainly a book to make one wonder at the relationship between scientists, politicians, and government administrators. Harris presents the story with a (to this Southerner) refreshing Canadian focus, and he reminds us of both the difficulties and the advantages that the Confederation faces in managing natural resources. My only quibble is with the author's periodic descent into hyperbole & the somewhat sloppy repetition of phrases and analogies -occasionally within the same paragraph. The horrifying facts of the case speak eloquently for themselves and don't really need a journalistic "push" to raise the reader's ire. Apart from that this book would be a good read for anyone concerned with natural resource exploitation and the complexities of international envirnmental policies.

As befits a man whose books have caused four royal commissions of inquiry,Michael Harris has chronicled the rise and fall of the Alantic Cod fishery with painstaking,sometimes painful, accuracy. There are no hero's here, only different degrees of guilty politicians, fishermen, and Department of Fisheries officials. The facts are laid out plainly, in order of appearance, and the readers draw their own conclusions with no editorializing or urging from the author. This is an informative book rather than an entertaining one, and will be the defining work on the subject.

I found Lament of an Ocean to be a wonderfully informative read. I approached the book out of necessity for a project, and was overjoyed by it's clarity, depth of detail and clever presentation on the Fishery crisis in the North Atlantic. I feel Harris's book brought me up to speed (and beyond) on the subject, in a manner that I found to be pleasantly unbiased.