»The Big Oyster

Once again, Mark Kurlansky has chosen an awesome topic and produced a mediocre book: see Salt and Cod. The Basque History of the World was an exception to this unfortunate outcome, in which his research and curiosity fall flat because of the writing. In The Big Oyster his prose again has many run-on sentences, mostly confusing compound constructions; the flow of the book is confounded by the intermittent, typographically-offset recipes he includes.

The history itself is fascinating: the humble oyster played a tremendous role in New York's economy and culture through the nineteenth century, and a pivotal role in understanding our effect on the New York Harbor through the twentieth.
The author presents riveting anecdotes and stories about Dutch, English, and American development in the city, all the while describing how Manhattan Island, Long Island Sound, and the Hudson estuary provided bountiful bivalves for us to eat in many preparations, build into roads and houses, and export to other nations.

As with other books that present a bygone and more sylvan portrait of America I felt nostalgic: I can't quite picture farms at 14th Street, or a trip to Turtle Bay taking a weekend from the Battery. I also have a hankering for oyster, and not just the tired sort one finds at the annual Oyster Festival (aside: I had some lovely photographs of the Oyster Festival from a few years ago, on a sunny afternoon in Dumbo, but can no longer find 'em. Pre-flickr.).