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Summary
Summary
A KID'S GUIDE TO THE OCEAN
"Can you imagine a world without fish? It's not as crazy as it sounds. But if we keep doing things the way we've been doing things, fish could become extinct within fifty years. So let's change the way we do things!"
World Without Fish is the uniquely illustrated narrative nonfiction account--for kids--of what is happening to the world's oceans and what they can do about it. Written by Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod, Salt, The Big Oyster , and many other books, World Without Fish has been praised as "urgent" ( Publishers Weekly ) and "a wonderfully fast-paced and engaging primer on the key questions surrounding fish and the sea" (Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish ). It has also been included in the New York State Expeditionary Learning English Language Arts Curriculum.
Written by a master storyteller, World Without Fish connects all the dots--biology, economics, evolution, politics, climate, history, culture, food, and nutrition--in a way that kids can really understand. It describes how the fish we most commonly eat, including tuna, salmon, cod, swordfish--even anchovies-- could disappear within fifty years, and the domino effect it would have: the oceans teeming with jellyfish and turning pinkish orange from algal blooms, the seabirds disappearing, then reptiles, then mammals. It describes the back-and-forth dynamic of fishermen, who are the original environmentalists, and scientists, who not that long ago considered fish an endless resource. It explains why fish farming is not the answer--and why sustainable fishing is, and how to help return the oceans to their natural ecological balance.
Interwoven with the book is a twelve-page graphic novel. Each beautifully illustrated chapter opener links to the next to form a larger fictional story that perfectly complements the text.
Author Notes
Mark Kurlansky is the author of The Basque History of the World, the New York Times bestseller Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (among the New York Public Library's Best Books of the Year in 1998), as well as A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry; A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny, and several acclaimed works of short fiction and journalism about the Caribbean. He spent seven years as the Caribbean correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.
He lives in New York City.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kurlansky (The Cod's Tale) offers an urgent account of the problems that threaten the world's oceans and could result in the commercial extinction of key species of fish in the next 50 years. It's an alarming statement, underscored by the book's design: on most pages, key sentences (and sometimes not-so-key ones) appear in an enormous, all-caps font, the typographical equivalent of a fire alarm ("THIS IS CALLED A SUSTAINABLE FISHERY. THIS IS THE REAL ANSWER TO OVERFISHING"). Kurlansky opens by outlining the problem-overfishing is resulting in "a massive shifting in the natural order of the planet"-before discussing the cultural, political, and industrial factors that have led to current conditions. Sidebars profile various fish as well as key historical moments, and the narrative is further broken up by comic book panels that tell the earnest story of Kram, a fictional scientist, and his daughter, Ailat, who witness the very destruction Kurlansky describes, as species vanish and the oceans turn slimy and orange with the resurgence of algae and krill. It's a dire vision, and Kurlansky's few suggestions (support sustainable fishing, become an activist) may not be much comfort. Ages 10-up. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
The decline of fish populations, due to overfishing, pollution, and global warming, is a major environmental concern. Kurlansky digs deeply and engagingly into the history and science of the issue and provides important recommendations for sustainable fishing (the scientific terminology is very occasionally imprecise). Each chapter ends with a comic that imagines the impact of fish extinctions over a human's lifetime. Websites. Ind. (c) Copyright 2011. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Kurlansky, whose children's books include The Cod's Tale (2001) and The Story of Salt (2006), sounds the alarm for the health of the fish, oceans, and, by extension, life on earth. A former commercial fisherman, he brings together a great deal of information and makes a persuasive case for how and why ocean life should be protected. With varied typography, some white-and-red lettering on black pages, and striking full-page illustrations as well as many smaller ones, the book's design is dynamic, though sometimes distracting. Readers who mistake the occasional colorful, huge-print sentences for pull quotes and skip them will miss important points in the text, at least until they figure out that these sentences are not repeated. Back matter includes advice for young activists and an annotated list of environmental groups concerned with marine issues, but the lack of a bibliography or source notes for quotes is disappointing. Still, this eye-catching, clearly written book presents a topic that is not well represented in books for young people.--Phelan, Caroly. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Cloudette, an impeccably cute cloud, has ambitions that outpace her modest size. "She wanted to make a brook babble. She wanted to make a waterfall fall. And she thought nothing would be more fun than giving some kids a day off from school." Her tale raises questions relevant to little children: Is there anything good about being small? Will I ever be as good as the big kids? What do clouds do anyway? They'll like the answers. THE VOYAGE OF TURTLE REX, by Kurt Cyrus. 40 pp. Harcourf. $16.99 (Picture book; ages 4 to 8) Unbeknown to many a dinosaur enthusiast, sea turtles and plesiosaurs were prehistoric contemporaries, and this vision of their undersea lives will offer respite to those readers - child and parent alike - who've overdosed on dino dictionaries and Tyrannosaurus rex. With oversize, comics-inflected artwork, Cyrus ("Tadpole Rex") follows the lifespan of the giant Archelon in rhyming couplets. It's March of the Turtles - childbirth, midlife adventure, eco-threats and all. TO MARKET, TO MARKET, by Nikki McClure. 40 pp. Abrams. $17.95. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8) With her distinctive cut-paper artistry, McClure ("Mama, Is It Summer Yet?"), follows a young boy and his mother on market day, when they shop for apples, kale, honey, smoked salmon and other green-market items, and traces each to its source. The style evokes a Robert McCloskey world of home-jarred jams, which may appeal more to parents, but kids will love learning how milk is curdled and honey collected from hives. SEASONS, by Anne Crausaz. 48 pp. Kane Miller. $15.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8) This beautifully illustrated French import stands out from many guides to the seasons by framing the weather in terms of a child's sensory experience. Crausaz knows the preschool audience well. Spring brings ladybugs; summer is about fireflies. "The wind is blowing the ants with the seeds. Let's follow them." With its mushrooms, chestnuts and fog, "Seasons" comes across as très Francais, but will appeal to all children. ENERGY ISLAND How One Community Harnessed the Wind and Changed Their World. By Allan Drummond. 40 pp. Frances Foster. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 6 to 10) "Energy Island" opens with the power of wind captured by a pin wheel, an illustration that neatly encapsulates this remarkably accessible book about the path to energy independence on the Danish island of Samso. Sidebars explain concepts like global warming and wind energy while the story follows a class, under the guidance of its teacher, as they rally the community to embrace turbines, solar panels and biomass furnaces. WORLD WITHOUT FISH, by Mark Kurlansky. Illustrated by Frank Stockton. 183 pp. Workman. $16.95. (Middle grade; ages 9 and up) Smartly packaged for budding environmentalists and nascent vegans, "World Without Fish" combines zoology, oceanography, politics, food and global warming into a readable narrative. A graphic novel is woven throughout and together with photographs, and full-color illustrations creates an effective warning against a future in which tuna sandwiches are replaced by jellyfish salad. PAMELA PAUL ONLINE A slide show of this week's illustrated books at nytimes.com/books.
Kirkus Review
The author ofCod (1997) successfully provides readers with a frightening look at the looming destruction of the oceans. Brief sections in graphic-novel format follow a young girl, Ailat, and her father over a couple of decades as the condition of the ocean grows increasingly dire, eventually an orange, slimy mess mostly occupied by jellyfish and leatherback turtles. At the end, Ailat's young daughter doesn't even know what the word fish means. This is juxtaposed against nonfiction chapters with topics including types of fishing equipment and the damage each causes, a history of the destruction of the cod and its consequences, the international politics of the fishing industry and the effects of pollution and global warming. The final chapter lists of some actions readers could take to attempt to reverse the damage: not eating certain types of fish, joining environmental groups, writing to government officials, picketing seafood stores that sell endangered fish, etc. Whenever an important point is to be made, font size increases dramatically, sometimes so that a single sentence fills a pageattention-getting but distractingly so. While it abounds with information, sadly, no sources are cited, undermining reliability. Additionally, there are no index and no recommended bibliography for further research, diminishing this effort's value as a resource. Depressing and scary yet grimly entertaining. (Nonfiction/graphic-novel hybrid. 10 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction Being A Brief Outline Of The Problem A large stock of individuals of the same species, relative to the number of its enemies, is absolutely necessary for its preservation. --Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species Most stories about the destruction of the planet involve a villain with an evil plot. But this is the story of how the earth could be destroyed by well-meaning people who fail to solve a problem simply because their calculations are wrong. Most of the fish we commonly eat, most of the fish we know, could be gone in the next fifty years. This includes salmon, tuna, cod, swordfish, and anchovies. If this happens, many other fish that depend on these fish will also be in trouble. So will seabirds that eat fish, such as seagulls and cormorants. So will mammals that eat fish, such as whales, porpoises, and seals. And insects that depend on seabirds, such as beetles and lizards. And mammals that depend on beetles and lizards. Slowly--or maybe not so slowly--in less time than the several billion years it took to create it--life on planet Earth could completely unravel. People who are in school today are lucky to have been born at a special moment in history. The Industrial Revolution, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and continuing for the next 120 years shifted production from handcrafts to machine-made factory goods and in so doing completely changed the relationship of people to nature, the relationship of people to each other, politics, art, and architecture--the look and thought of the world. In the next fifty years, much of your working life, there will be as much change in less than half the time. The future of the world, perhaps even the survival of the planet, will depend on how well these changes are handled. And so you have more opportunities and more responsibilities than any other generation in history. One of the great thinkers of the Industrial Revolution was an Englishman named Charles Darwin. In 1859, he had published one of the most important books ever written : On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life , more commonly known by its shortened title: On the Origin of Species . In his book, Darwin explained the order of nature as a system in which all the many various plant and animal species struggle for survival. He did not see nature as particularly nice or kind, but as a cruel system in which species attempted to kill and dominate other species in order to secure the survival of their own kind. He wrote, "We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us, mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life." Plants and animals are organized into groups with seven major levels or categories: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus (plural: genera), species. A codfish and a human belong to the same kingdom, which is animals. They also belong to the same phylum, which is vertebrates (animals with spines). But after that, they break off into completely different classes-- cod are fish and humans are mammals. More specifically, humans are vertebrates of the class known as mammals in the order known as primates, which we share with monkeys and lemurs. We belong to the family Hominidae, which we share with apes and chimpanzees. Within that family, we are of the genus Homo , which are Hominidae that walk standing up on two feet. (Several other Homo genera have all died off and we are the only surviving species of this family: Homo sapiens .) Cod, on the other hand, are fish--specifically fish with jaws--that belong to a family called Gadidae. This fish family is fairly evolved, has elaborate fins, and lives in the bottom part of the ocean. They hunt voraciously the species living directly over and beneath them, and have white flesh greatly favored by Homo sapiens . Darwin wrote of how all species struggle for the survival of their own group. So it is not surprising that we humans have the greatest affection for organisms that are biologically close to us. Killing our own species is the worst thing we can do. Killing close relatives to our species, like monkeys, though it occurs, is revolting to most of us. We tend to care more about our own class--mammals, such as whales and seals and polar bears--than we do about fish. Is that because they are in a different class? Is that why people tend to have less sympathy for animals that are not in our phylum, like insects? Ultimately, a vegetarian is a human who rejects killing living things from his own kingdom--animals--but accepts killing from the other kingdom--plants. Excerpted from World Without Fish by Mark Kurlansky All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
