Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting and the Discovery of the New World Book

I am a fan of Brian Fagan and am a supporter of his effort to act as interlocutor between the worlds of academe and the popular hunger for knowledge. However, this is the weakest of his books that I have read so far. He certainly has a lot of really interesting history in this book and a great many things that I did not know. On that basis, the content, I would give the book five stars.

However, while Fagan's prose is characteristically clear, the book suffers from a lackluster composition (for Fagan!) It did not seem that Fagan's heart was truly in this book or conversely that he was not entirely sure of how to organize and think about this information. For instance, while the book strongly integrated the importance of Catholic practice regarding abstention from meat (most famously on Friday and during Lent and which forms the title of the book), somewhere near the last third of the book he gives up discussing the religious dimension (well, there is that Reformation thing) and focuses primarily on the Newfoundland and New England fisheries. Fish on Friday quietly drops out, and this kind of mostly unannounced leave left me unsatisfied. Moreover, didn't a lot of Southern European countries remain Catholic and salted fish remained a staple well into the Twentieth Century? The Gloucester fishing schooners were still preparing salt cod well into the 20th century for American and European Catholics.

A telling sign of the issues with the book's composition is the lack of a concluding chapter. There is just a half page summary at the very end of the book, and this is plainly not sufficient (to me anyway). Fagan chose as an end point the rise to dominance of the port of Boston. However, as referenced above, Catholic Europe as well as the U.S.'s burgeoning Catholic population (e.g. New England Portuguese) continued to demand fish into the 20th century. What of that? In any case, even ending where Fagan did is defensible if he had chosen to at least discuss it in a concluding chapter, which need not be long, had he done so. His failure to "tie the strings together" left me with a dissatisfied feeling.

Nevertheless, I am eager to read his new book on fishing (called, appropriately, FISHING) and the reviewed work here may be a sort of first effort at the topic, which is fine. The content alone makes it well worth reading and Fagan is a star popularizer (in the best sense of the word). This book is an important and vital read for anyone interested in the importance of fishing as industry and as cultural practice as well as fishing as a key instance of seafaring and the development of maritime technology.