The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company
Author: David A Pric
The roller-coaster rags-to-riches story behind the phenomenal success of Pixar Animation Studios, and the first in-depth look at the company that forever changed the film industry and the "fraternity of geeks" who shaped it.
Books about: Save Your Knees or The Perricone Promise
The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town
Author: Mark Kurlansky
The bestselling author of Cod, Salt, and The Big Oyster has enthralled readers with his incisive blend of culinary, cultural, and social history. Now, in his most colorful, personal, and important book to date, Mark Kurlansky turns his attention to a disappearing way of life: fishing–how it has thrived in and defined one particular town for centuries, and what its imperiled future means for the rest of the world.
The culture of fishing is vanishing, and consequently, coastal societies are changing in unprecedented ways. The once thriving fishing communities of Rockport, Nantucket, Newport, Mystic, and many other coastal towns from Newfoundland to Florida and along the West Coast have been forced to abandon their roots and become tourist destinations instead. Gloucester, Massachusetts, however, is a rare survivor. The livelihood of America’s oldest fishing port has always been rooted in the life and culture of commercial fishing.
The Gloucester story began in 1004 with the arrival of the Vikings. Six hundred years later, Captain John Smith championed the bountiful waters off the coast of Gloucester, convincing new settlers to come to the area and start a new way of life. Gloucester became the most productive fishery in New England, its people prospering from the seemingly endless supply of cod and halibut. With the introduction of a faster fishing boat–the schooner–the industry flourished. In the twentieth century, the arrival of Portuguese, Jews, and Sicilians turned the bustling center into a melting pot. Artists and writers such as Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, and T. S. Eliot came to the fishing town and foundinspiration.
But the vital life of Gloucester was being threatened. Ominous signs were seen with the development of engine-powered net-dragging vessels in the first decade of the twentieth century. As early as 1911, Gloucester fishermen warned of the dire consequences of this new technology. Since then, these vessels have become even larger and more efficient, and today the resulting overfishing, along with climate change and pollution, portends the extinction of the very species that fishermen depend on to survive, and of a way of life special not only to Gloucester but to coastal cities all over the world. And yet, according to Kurlansky, it doesn’t have to be this way. Scientists, government regulators, and fishermen are trying to work out complex formulas to keep fishing alive.
Engagingly written and filled with rich history, delicious anecdotes, colorful characters, and local recipes, The Last Fish Tale is Kurlansky’s most urgent story, a heartfelt tribute to what he calls “socio-diversity” and a lament that “each culture, each way of life that vanishes, diminishes the richness of civilization.”
The Washington Post - H. Bruce Franklin
Bursting with ironies, Mark Kurlansky's epic history of Gloucester sweeps from the 17th century, when English colonists starved amid the world's greatest marine abundance, to the 21st century, when opulent resorts line the coast of a depleted ocean. As Kurlansky tells us at the outset, "A fish tale exaggerates to make things look bigger. It is triumphal." But he calls this book a "Gloucester story," which is "just the opposite"—"a story of miserable irony…with a sad ending."
Publishers Weekly
Bestselling author Kurlansky (Cod; The Big Oyster) provides a delightful, intimate history and contemporary portrait of the quintessential northeastern coastal fishing town: Gloucester, Mass., on Cape Anne. Illustrated with his own beautifully executed drawings, Kurlansky's book vividly depicts the contemporary tension between the traditional fishing trade and modern commerce, which in Gloucester means beach-going tourists. One year ago, a beach preservation group enraged fishermen by seeking to harvest 105 acres of prime fishing ground for sand to deposit on the shoreline. Wealthy yacht owners compete with fishermen for prime dockage, driving up prices. Fishermen also contend with federal limits on their catches in an effort to maintain sustainable fisheries. But while cod are protected from extinction, the fishermen are not. Some boats must go 100 or more miles out to sea-a danger for small boats with few crew members. Tragedies abound, while one, that of the swordfish boat Andrea Gail, documented by Sebastian Junger in A Perfect Storm, brought even more tourists to Gloucester. (June 3)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Margaret Rioux - Library Journal
Kurlansky's 1997 best seller, Cod, was subtitled A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. His latest work can also be described as a biography, this time of the fishing town of Gloucester, MA. Although Gloucester is unique, its history serves as an exemplar of the changing nature of commercial fishing in the North Atlantic, especially regarding people, equipment, and target species. It also serves as a means of examining the problems of modern fishing towns as they try to find new ways of surviving in a world of collapsing fish populations without losing the best of their heritage. Kurlansky is a skillful writer, holding readers' interest and educating them at the same time with his mixture of facts, anecdotes, and even recipes. All of us, not just those living on the coast, should be aware of the issues he raises here. An excellent complement to the author's Cod and Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell as well as to Eric Jay Dolan's Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America; highly recommended for all public, high school, and college libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ2/1/08; library marketing campaign planned.-Ed.]
Kirkus Reviews
Kurlansky (Nonviolence: 25 Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea, 2006, etc.) brings his storytelling elan to the fishing town of Gloucester, Mass. Its fine harbor, abundance of fish and reasonable climate attracted one of the earliest European settlements in America to this sheltered spot on the Cape Ann peninsula. In 1623, employees of an English fish-trading company constructed a few huts, cured some cod and departed to sell it in Bilbao, leaving behind 14 farmers. Gloucester has been internationally known ever since, and Kurlansky fills in the background to explain how it evolved into "an Irish, Scandinavian, Portuguese, Sicilian town" dedicated to its fishery. Such a multicultural place suits this author perfectly; he can revel in the local color, peek into the corners and under the floorboards. Topical chapters sketch the town's tribal insularity and self-sufficiency, the tragedies wreaked by fierce storms at sea and the milky light that has drawn such artists as Fitz Hugh Lane, Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley and Edward Hopper to Gloucester. Kurlansky offers a broad, intelligent examination into the decline of the fisheries. "If the fishermen are following the regulators and the regulators are listening to the scientists, and yet the fish stocks continue to be depleted," he asks, "who is getting it wrong?" The devouring maw of tourists and developers, attracted by the ambience they speedily kill, raises the specter of vanishing cultural diversity and economic egalitarianism. On a more cheerful note, Kurlansky celebrates the special requirements of Gloucester's famous greased-pole walk: "It is generally recognized that to be a successful pole walker a contestant must betremendously brave, extremely agile, and extraordinarily drunk."A lucent addition to Gloucester's town treasury, featuring a wealth of dramatic stories. Agent: Charlotte Sheedy/Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency
Table of Contents:
Prologue: Pole walkers
Ch. 1 The First Gloucester Story 3
Ch. 2 A Tale of Woe 19
Ch. 3 The Island Named Gloucester 29
Ch. 4 Scooning 35
Ch. 5 The Replacements 60
Ch. 6 .Among tlie Rocks 90
Ch. 7 This Gloire of Gloucester 106
Ch. 8 While Gloucester Burns 124
Ch. 9 The Fish Is is Us 141
Ch. 10 The Sea and the Seaside 172
Ch. 11 Surviving on the Mainland 219
Bibliography 247
Acknowledgments 255
Index 257
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