Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World - Softcover

"A charming fish tale and a pretty gift for your favorite seafood cook or fishing monomaniac. But in the last analysis, it's a bitter ecological fable for our time." -Los Angeles Times

"Every once in a while a writer of particular skill takes a fresh, seemingly improbable idea and turns out a book of pure delight. Such is the case of Mark Kurlansky and the codfish." -David McCullough, author of 1776, John Adams, and The Wright Brothers

"One of the 25 Best Books of the Year." -The New York Public Library

"A subject as mighty and tragic as this deserves an excellent biographer, and in Mark Kurlansky, cod has found one. Beautifully written and elegantly illustrated . . . Kurlansky's marvelous fish opus stands as a reminder of what good non-fiction used to be: eloquent, learned, and full of earthy narratives that delight and appall." -The Globe and Mail

"In the end the book stands as a kind of elegy, a loving eulogy not only to a fish, but to the people whose lives have been shaped by the habits of the fish, and whose way of life is now at an end." -Newsday

"What a prodigious creature is the cod. Kurlansky's approach is intriguing - and deceptively whimsical. This little book is a work of no small consequence." -Business Week

"In the story of the cod, Mark Kurlansky has found the tragic fable of our age - abundance turned to scarcity through determined shortsightedness. This classic history will stand as an epitaph and a warning." -Bill McKibben

A witty romp through history uses the codfish as its main character, showing how cod became the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, while also questioning how depleted codfish stocks might affect the world's future, given their impact on the past. Reprint. Tour.