Against the Tide: The Fate of the New England Fisherman (Hardcover)

by Richard Adams Carey (Author) "BRIAN GIBBONS likes jazz..." (more)
Key Phrases: pegging board, seed quahogs, dragger interests, New England, Cape Cod, Georges Bank (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Like many kids fortunate enough to spend summers by the shore, writer/journalist Richard Adams Carey grew up with a healthy respect for fishermen and the sea, "a world of astonishing color and shape and texture, of surprise and a perceptible knife-edge of menace." During the '90s, when headlines described the demise of New England's small-boat family fishermen, he decided to head back to Cape Cod to learn what he could about a threatened way of life and the forces--political, commercial, ecological--which imperil the survival of the fish the industry depends on. To this end, he spent a year working alongside four veterans of the Cape's inshore waters: a crewmate on a dragger (a boat that catches groundfish with a dragnet towed along the ocean bottom); a lobsterman; a long-liner (who sets quarter-mile or longer fishing lines sporting baited hooks every three feet); and a quahog dredger (essentially a clammer who harvests in bulk). Carey deftly weaves the details of their hard-won, unpredictable lives with passages on local and global fishing history, the minutiae of national and regional legislation severely regulating the fishing industry, the vicissitudes of the weather, and a smattering of stories and anecdotes. Throughout colonial times, for instance, fishermen regularly caught lobsters 4 feet long and weighing 45 pounds! Such an ancient, sizable creature is nearly inconceivable today.

Despite the tenacity of the men he fished with, Carey acknowledges that the owner-operators of small family boats off New England are likely going the way of the family farmer. Yet he reminds us that the issues deciding their fate concern us all: "how to tap this continent's wealth without plundering and despoiling it; how to reconcile our hard-wired demand for growth and consumption with a husbandman's concern for sustainability; how to mark our limits and resolutely stay within them." --Svenja Soldovieri

From The Washington Post
"This book should be read for its balanced portrayal of a New England fishery, but more than that it exemplifies the classic conflict between natural and human resources. Yes, it is true that certain kinds of fishing are very destructive. But Carey is also a humanist and a journalist of considerable depth, who weaves the fate of men and fish together into a whole story."

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 382 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; 2nd edition (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395765307
• ISBN-13: 978-0395765302
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,509,580 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Better subtitle "Death of the New England Fisherman"?, April 18, 2000

By	Terry B. (Merrimack, NH USA) - See all my reviews

Being a New England fisherman (hehe-rather, woman) I found the day-to-day lives of the fisherman very interesting-who knew scallops had blue eyes? However, I had a difficult time following the time frame of events because of the way Mr. Carey jumped around. I couldn't even tell exactly what year this book was taking place without some re-reading. The politics involved are sickening in the amount of time wasted and the fact that the committees could get nothing accomplished, evidenced with the ongoing cod crisis in New England today. Too bad none of the politicians involved happened to read this book.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent inside look at the Commercial Fishing Industry., October 7, 1999

By	Louis J. Goodman ([e-mail]) (Hayward, California) - See all my reviews

If you read The Perfect Storm and came away wanting to know more about the commercial fishing industry, this is the book. Carey explains the views of the men and women who risk life, limb, and fortune in the waters off Cape Cod. He also explains the tedium of public hearings and governmental rule making which impact the lives of the fishermen.

I spent the summer in a rented house overlooking the commercial fishing fleet in Bodega Bay, California. I often wondered what happened on those boats once they left the harbor, and what regulations governed them. Against the Tide explains it all.

By way of criticism, I found the characters a bit hard to follow and the discussions of the regulations a bit tedious, but overall I learned a lot.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An enlightening look at a fading industry., October 2, 1999

By	Richard Hughes (Falmouth, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

Richard Adams Carey has crafted a detailed look at a failing industry and a very well written narrative. One can only hope that present and future fishermen and politicians, American and Internationally, read Mr. Carey's book and learn from the mistakes of the past. The book brings you into the daily lives of New England fishermen in an honest, pragmatic way that doesn't decry the sins of history but certainly lays them bare for all of us to learn from. The author has carefully crafted and documented his first hand accounts, and recreates other aspects in a highly readable and informative style. If you're sick of Wall Street success stories, here's an in depth look at the lives of many equally important but far less appreciated Americans.