Reviews
Tuna
A Love Story
by richard ellis
Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. $27.95, 352 pages.
practices, and the world is doing little to
stop it.
Ellis describes how “horse mackerel”
went from being a junk >sh to a delicacy
worth more per ounce than gold. Sport
>shermen enamored of its size made it
popular to >sh, and the burgeoning
sashimi market—at >rst Japanese but
quickly spreading round the globe—made
it popular to eat. Once the prices got high
enough, the money was just too good.
Ellis lays out the gruesome details of
industrial >shing, including drift-netting,
in which miles-long nets ?oat through
the ocean killing everything in their path,
and the insidious new practice of “tuna
ranching,” or capturing juveniles and
fattening them for the market in feedlot-like pens, a practice with dire consequences for the >sh stocks. Nor does he
much approve of the ancient Sicilian
tradition of mattanza, where nets encircle
the >sh and draw them
to the center to be
ga=ed. “Seeing a blue-
>n ga=ed with spears,”
writes Ellis, “is like
watching a Thoroughbred racehorse hacked to
death with an ax.”
Rich in description,
Tuna is packed with information and occasionally repeats itself. How
many times, you can almost hear the author
thinking, do I have to say
this stu= Alas, the answer seems continually to
be just a few more. It’s hard
The Last Fish Tale
The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester,
America’s Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town
by mark kurlansky
Ballantine Books, 2008. $25, 304 pages.
reviewed by ginger strand
THE CLARION CALLS ringing out about
our over>shed oceans now constitute an
entire horn section—yet the symphony
still goes largely unheard. I was recently
distressed to see Chilean sea bass—a >sh
on the very brink of extinction—at supposedly conscientious Whole Foods. Two
new books are adding their voices to the
din, each exploring the collapse of our
global >sheries by focusing
on one piece of it: a single
species and a single town.
Tuna: A Love Story is
aptly named. Author and
marine artist Richard Ellis
loves this >sh. His rapt description of the physiology
that makes tunas one of the
fastest things in the ocean—
they’re warm-blooded >sh,
odd as that seems—lends
emotional urgency to his
account of the collapsing tuna
>shery. Ellis, author of Men
and Whales and The Empty
Ocean, has for years held the unenviable
job of playing Cassandra outside the pro>t
palaces of the world’s commercial >sh-
eries. Here you get the distinct feeling he
may be growing frustrated at the lack of
response. A >sh he describes as an “en-
gineering marvel” is being hemmed in
by a plethora of un-
conscionable >shing
