SALMON

'A Fish, the Earth, and the History of a Common Fate' is the sub-title of this celebration of the majestic and mysterious salmon. Over the centuries a vital resource, a dietary staple and an irresistible catch, there is so much more to this extraordinary fish as Mark Kurlansky reveals. If we can save salmon, we can save the world. Salmon persist as a barometer for the health of our planet. Atlantic salmon is always 100% farm raised. Only Pacific types are wild caught if you have ever wondered when looking at a restaurant menu. In a tale of two fisheries and more, chapters cover Old Ways and a New Land, A Golden Fish Arrives in the East, The White Man Comes, The Elegy for the Atlantic, The Ballad of the Pacific and The Golden Fish Departs. We meet Ole Olson and his young Montana fishing crew in Alaska and ships in the bay that buy the catch and put it on ice. We are taken to locations like the rivers of Bristol Bay and the Copper River winding 300 miles through rapids, rugged turns and falls where the salmon come in to spawn and there are fine specimens there and in the Prince William Sound and other great American salmon rivers like the Columbia, the Snake, the Sacramento and the Connecticut. The pollution of the industrial revolution choke salmon and now salmon are threatened by climate change with the decline in fish proportionate to the rise in temperature being verifiable. And hatcheries should stop diminishing with genetic diversity of the stocks. Full of the writer's characteristic curiosity and insight it is a magisterial history of a wondrous creature. 324pp, colour and other photos.