Bedtime Reading on Fishing
From Fishfolk, with special thanks to Chris Finlayson for compiling
Fiction:
George Foy
A murder mystery set in the
commercial fishery of southern
Colin Thiele 1969
Adolescents in
Paul Watkins 1996
Scallop trawler.
Rudyard Kipling.
A classic novel
of the
Coastliners; a novel
Joanne Harris 2002
Set in coastal
community suffering from erosion (and fisheries
decline, etc.),
painfully coming together to deal with its problems--- including
building a tire reef
Peter Matthiessen 1975
Turtles rather than fin fish but it captures season, weather, sea conditions, boats and seafarers in a way few manage.
Mark Richard 1993
Fiction written after 3 years crewing on trawler out of
Maybe not so much about fishing as what it does to the mind.
Fishermen's Son (The)
Michael Koepf 1998
Koepf worked for 19 years as a fisherman.
Gaff Topsails
Patrick Kavanagh
Ann Shriver: [This] is the best novel of any sort I have read in a long
time. It's about a
Hunter and the Whale (The)
Laurens Van der Post
A young Boer hunter ships out with
a multi-cultural crew on a whaling vessel from
Barbara Painter and Yam Lovelock (original
1948, translation 1973)
The boatmen, fishermen etc of a river community in
Old Man and the Sea (The)
Ernest Hemingway
Greg Billington 2003
Greg was an inshore fisherman then worked for the New Zealand Fishing Industry Board.
Martin Cruz Smith
A murder mystery set on a Soviet
factory trawler working a joint venture with US catcher vessels in the
Peter Hawes 2002
The author grew up in
on the West Coat of the South Island (NZ). Its an account of the first
(alleged) bluefin caught by a New Zealander and
tracks its shipment to
Tsukiji Market Tokyo.
Silver Darlings (The)
Neil M. Gunn 1941
"herring fishers of the wild Scottish coast".
John Casey
It's about life on two
Leo Walmsley 1932
The story of
North-East coast (
B.S. Johnson 1968
"a
stranger on a fishing trawler burrows through the corridors of
his mind, recreating the past, trying to discover the reason for eternal
solitude".
Non-Fiction:
Against the Tide, the Fate of the
Richard Adams Carey
A beautifully written memoir of a
to
salmon runs in the
Canal can be one of the nastiest bits of water in
Pierre Loti (1886)
William W. Warner
Ecology and
commerce of the blue crab fishery in the
Richard Grossinger 1974.
(and
subsequent volumes). The journal of
an observer of lobster fishermen.
Joseph
Mitchell 1959
This
is an anthology of essays Mitchell originally published in the
New Yorker in the 40s and 50s. Most have to do with the NYC
waterfront-- the Fulton Fish Market, oyster fishermen in
Staten
Island--
and some go a little further afield: dragger
fishermen for
flounder in
Buried Dreams: The Rise and Fall
of a Clam Cannery on the
Katherine Johnson
free from
the Lake Clark/Katmai National Park and Preserve,
Randy Wayne White
Regarding the
commercial net ban controversy in the state of
Cod: A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World
Mark Kurlansky
J.Russ McGoodwin 1990.
A critical overview of world's fisheries, their management problems, the science employed, fishing people and their cultures (Icelandic captain: "if you want to fish cod, you must think like cod"). Simply a classic; well-written, easy to read, and a great eye-opener.
Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fishermen
William W. Warner
The story of the last years of the factory trawler fleets in the North Atlantic prior to the extension of the EEZ to 200 miles.
David
Butcher
Describes the bygone herring
driftnet fishery of East Anglia, Lowestoft and Great
Yarmouth
Entanglements: The Intertwined Fates of
Whales and Fishermen
Tora Johnson, ISBN: 0-8130-2797-7, Publisher: University Press of
Centuries of whale-human interaction have led to the crisis explored in
this book about the battle between conservation, tradition, and economics in
the waters of
Fred
Normandale
Paul
Powell 1976.
Lobster fishing in the sounds in the southwest corner of NZ's
Fishermen:
The Sociology of an Extreme Occupation (The)
Jeremy
Tunstall 1962
The
book deals with the distant water trawl fishery from
Hull
and has a detailed description of community life of the fishermen's
wives and families.
Fishing for a Living
Alan Haig-Brown
"Fishing for a Living" is
a somewhat odd assembly of essays, true
stories, interviews, anecdotes, short family sagas, and technical
description of boats. However, it makes a lot of sense, and after reading it
one feels strangely at home with the BC fishing community and the associated
industries.
Fishing for Truth: A Sociological Analysis of Northern Cod Stock Assessments from 1977 to 1990
Alan Christopher Finlayson 1994
Edith Iglauer
Follow the Whale
Ivan T. Sanderson (1956)
The history of whaling from prehistoric times to 1950.
Wesley George Pierce
Great Lobster Chase: The Real Story of Maine Lobsters and
the Men Who Catch Them (The)
Mike Brown
Hedin Bru. The Old Man and his Sons.
Paul S. Eriksson. 1970.
"The skillfully told story of a handful of people, living their sea-washed,
daring and difficult lives on these remote islands, vibrates with a spirit,
almost at times a savagery, that recalls the ancient Norsemen and Viking
sagas. Yet this is the story of modern times...A pearl of glistening
humour..."
Linda Greenlaw
In the
Slick of the Cricket
Russell
Drumm 1998
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship
Nathaniel Philbrick
2001 (Penguin Reissue Edition)
Tomas O Crohan (Thomas O Criomthain)
An astonishing book on life in the Blasket Islands, Ireland
It’s All
Politics: South Alabama's Seafood Industry
E. Paul Durrenberger 1992
Thor Heyerdahl
Michael Harris
Pol Chantraine
Pierre Schoendorfer 1976
Gives a picture of fish inspection off St Pierre & Miquelon.
Linda Greenlaw.
John Steinbeck
Patrick Dillion
I was very interested by the
technical aspects of the modifications of the
vessels and the stability issues which arise.
Michael Joseph1969
It's a raw description by
journalist William Mitford of life aboard the 'Arctic Fox', fishing for cod in the '60's out
of
Peter
Matthiessen 1985
R.B.
Robertson 1956 & 1961.
A most vivid and exciting story written by a ship's doctor on
board a whale mothership, about his 8-month long encounter with extraordinary people and the whales they were hunting. High seas fishermen (and their wives) would find in this book many features familiar to them.
Oyster: from Montparnasse
to Greenwell Point
Nicolette Strasko 2000
Oyster cultivation in
Francis
E. Caldwell 1982
Pierre Loti
Sebastian Junger
Priscilla Doel.
Power
Begins at the Codend, Social and Economic Studies, No.261980.
David MacDonald
The Raft
Fishermen (in
Shepard
Forman.
An
anthropologist's account of his life and study in a northern
Brazilian fishing village and of what makes jangada
fishermen and their
families tick. A social scientist's follow
up, sort of, to Gorge Amado's "The Sea of
Death".
Sea Around Us (The)
Rachel Carson
R.C. O' Farrell
A description of
coastal fishery in
Farley Mowat
A
John
Cordell (Ed) 1989 Artesinal fisheries
Andrew Lang
Contains an argument for the building of commercial fishing
boats entitled. "
Terranova: The Ethos and Luck of Deep-Sea Fishermen
Joseba Zulaika 1981
Robert
Lee Maril 1983
An English naturalist, traveller
and writer (the author) going off
for a trip with an Orkney deep-sea trawler in some v. bad weather.
Susan Playfair
Farley
Mowat
The
harrowing story of the seal hunt on the spring ice off
R.E. Johannes
Fridman, A. 1998
A
book, which apart from his views on the management of world
fisheries, contains an array of amazing
stories and recollections from his
work in the fishing fleet and research centres of the
and in particular of the various people
he met and worked with during his
long career all over the world. The book
is an easy-to-read mix of
fishery science, fisheries management, and
more than those, of reflections
on people, problems, and what not.
Richly illustrated, it enables
the readers to fit photographed faces
to many of the people Fridman
wrote about, from Hemingway to Puretic, and from a Chinese sage from the 5th century BC, Fan-Li, to the Norse god Loki, who turned himself.
Authors:
Arthur C. Clarke, The
(Suggested by Kara)
James Connelly in the first decades of the 20th century....
William MacFarland...
Peter Matthiessen, Edgar Watson novel trilogy (Killing
Mister Watson, Lost Man's
River,
and Bone by Bone)
These are not about fishing or fishermen, but do feature some fisher folk and are set in
the Ten Thousand Islands area of southwest
Film:
in
Orson Welles "Its all True" a series of 4
documentary films he made in
In
Fading Light, 1989. Running time: 103 mins, Colour, Optical, Available
in: 16 mm VHS Tape.
Silver Medal,
Silver Anchor,
http://www.amber-online.com/html/in_fading_light.html
It includes the poem:
"In fading light they homeward came windy dispossessed and ravaged and all the lovely ocean sighed in grief for darkness drove the world but some calamity drove the men".
Tuna Cowboys
Nick Pluker has one of the most dangerous jobs
in the world; he is a wild sea-going cowboy who each year heads out into the
perilous Southern Ocean to round up his herd - Southern bluefin
tuna. The challenge is to muster the fish, defend the lucrative catch from
sharks - eager for a taste of the valuable stock - and return safely to the
tuna farm on the coast with every single fish alive and unscathed.
For the first time ever the drama of one of these treacherous musters is
captured on camera. Tuna Cowboys ventures 250 miles out to sea to
witness the action-packed muster and the fearless wrangles as the cowboys take
on the sharks while slowly making their way home.
1 x 1hr (Commission for National Geographic US and National Geographic
International)
It still
seems to be shown from time to time, so if people keep an eye on NG programming
they can catch it.