A simple but satisfying blend of memoir, cultural anthropology and environmental analysis.
Lessons from four grueling summers spent fishing for sockeye salmon in an isolated village on the Alaskan peninsula.
Egegik is part of Bristol Bay, one of the world’s biggest—and last remaining—sockeye salmon runs. Lured by the unparalleled beauty of the Alaskan bush, Carter (Fools Rush In: A True Story of Love, War, and Redemption, 2005) joined the team of Sharon Hart and Carl Adams, seasoned fishermen who earned their colleagues’ respect for their toughness and their peculiar brand of hospitality. The author’s struggle to fit in with the often hostile residents of Egegik prompted him to analyze the community’s warped social structure, engendered by brutal working and living conditions. He spends as much time sketching the characters in the village as he does describing their shared occupation. Hart, Adams and Carter practiced set netting, which involves stretching out a long net and waiting for the salmon to fill it, then laboriously picking out the fish, often for 15 hours at a time. Each day, the team filled their skiffs with thousands of pounds of salmon, which, like the cold water and extreme tides, surrounded the fishermen with plenty of potential complications. Despite the danger, exhaustion and near-constant physical pain, Carter could not resist returning each summer for four years. In Egegik he found a place where nature still rules, where time (as defined by “the Lower 48”) does not exist and where backbreaking work calms the mind, distilling its desires down to the basics of food, shelter and rest. In addition to providing lively anecdotes, Carter explores the larger environmental and cultural circumstances of his job with sensitivity and intelligence, couching the particularities of the fishing process and the salmon life cycle in terms a novice can follow.
A simple but satisfying blend of memoir, cultural anthropology and environmental analysis.Pub Date: May 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9706-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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