Author Author

This morning I was speaking to a colleague who is about to leave for three weeks in Gloucester, and she’s eager to read The Last Fish Tale by Mark Kurlansky. As she should be! Unlike Kurlansky’s famous books Salt and Cod, which focused on commodities through the lens of numerous places, this book focuses on one place using a number of lenses: the fishing industry, immigration, demographics, preserving culture, geography…it’s a fascinating and fully realized portrait of an American place that is beyond sui generis. Gloucester’s separation from the rest of Massachusetts is more than just a canal-cut deep; it’s a place that thrives on being unto itself.

I hope you’ll enjoy watching my interview with Kurlansky. He’s very smart, and his ideas about how Gloucester can survive and thrive in a post-fishing economy have bearings on other places in the U.S., too.