Trevor – diver, fish-watcher and marine conservationist – travelled across three oceans to experience first-hand the drama in the life of the sardine. With funding from the Society of Author’s Roger Deakin Award, Trevor interviewed fishermen, mariners and scientists across four continents to research Sardine (Reaktion Books). The result? A ground-breaking, highly readable yet authoritative account of the fish in art, commerce, ecology, history, literature and beyond.
This is what reviewers had to say:
Superb.
— Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Review
Thank you Trevor Day for making the commonplace miraculous. Sardines provide the second largest fish catch worldwide, sustain coastal peoples all over the world and are the basis of many oceanic ecosystems. A glorious book in a great series that makes you think again.
— Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country and Birds Britannica
Sardine reviews the history of the fish and its importance to humans. Day explores the biology and history of the sardine, the rise and fall of global sardine fisheries, and the role this fishery has played throughout human history, including its significance to religion, art, and culinary circles… avoiding complex terminology and making it appropriate for all levels of readership.
— Choice magazine
Sardine is a delight. The debt to Mark Kurlansky’s Cod is clear, but Trevor Day’s canvas goes beyond Kurlansky’s historical, human-centred approach to look at life from the sardine’s point of view as well. The gauntlet of the ‘sardine run’, off the coast of South Africa, when every dolphin and seabird in the region is after them. … Day is also good on the scientists who have painted the canvas of the sardines’ lifestyle. Sir Alister Hardy, with his continuous plankton recorder. Charles Hickling, who devoted more than three years of his life to recording sardines’ stomach contents. Even Ed Ricketts, essentially an amateur, who was the inspiration for ‘Doc’ in Cannery Row, a novel set among sardine canneries. The wider history is there, too, though. Who knew that Thomas Bodley, the founder of Oxford University’s library, owed his fortune to sardines? Or that St Anthony of Padua has a sardine festival on the streets of Lisbon. Or that, in 19th-century Cornwall, there was a profession called ‘huer’ which involved sitting on a cliff top day after day trying to spot sardine shoals, and then directing boats towards them by a system of semaphore. Sardines may not have driven the colonisation of new worlds, or provoked wars, in quite the way that codfish once did. But they were every bit as important to local economies, and local nutrition. And they are every bit as interesting.
— Geoff Carr, Science Editor, The Economist
You can buy Sardine from Reaktion Books (UK), The University of Chicago Press (US) or from your usual suppliers such as Amazon (UK), Amazon (US).
