The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and The Geography of Desire

From Publishers Weekly
With the humanism and narrative mastery that won him acclaim for Against the Tide, ecojournalist Carey weaves the story of an enigmatic fish and the "multitude of hooks" in the "gilded morsel." Geneticists believe the sturgeon holds the key to understanding the secrets of vertebrate evolution; canny entrepreneurs, meanwhile, pursue it for the high prices it fetches. Navigating the eddies of avarice and ecological altruism, Carey baits with hard data, arresting first-person writing and well-wrought insights. This is the sort of nonfiction that, by virtue of the author's generalist assurance, can satisfy a broad readership. Students of global political economy, for example, will find plenty to admire in a book whose subject, viewed as a commodity, echoes--and is imperiled by--that of oil, the Caspian region's other black gold. Those with stateside interests--e.g., American natural history and environmentalism--will also find the work fascinating, as few creatures could better illuminate the rift between the utilitarian and the preservationist factions of the American environmental movement. The interconnected stories Carey shares converge in a deeper understanding of the human species, one whose desires are embodied as much by the gun-toting buccaneers of the Caspian coast as by the rain-slickered and lab-coated ranks of the world's sturgeon hatcheries. Agent, Gary Morris of the David Black Literary Agency. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description
From the acclaimed Rick Carey ("a humanist and a journalist of considerable depth" Washington Post), a fascinating chronicle of a fast-disappearing fish-and of the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on it. Since the days of the Persian Empire, caviar has trumpeted status, wealth, prestige, and sex appeal. Today it goes for up to one hundred dollars an ounce, and aficionados will go to extraordinary lengths to get their fill of it. According to acclaimed writer Richard Adams Carey, that's just the problem. In this spectacular jaunt, Carey immerses himself in the world of sturgeon, the fish that lays these golden eggs. What he finds is disturbing: Sturgeon populations worldwide have declined 70 percent in the last twenty years, most drastically in the Caspian Sea. The beluga sturgeon, producer of the most coveted caviar, has climbed to number four on the World Wildlife Fund's most-endangered species list. Armed with a novelist's eye for human eccentricity and an investigator's nose for trouble, Carey takes us on an illuminating journey across the globe to uncover the secrets of the sturgeon. On that trek we meet the fascinating real-life characters both profiting from its scarcity and fighting to save it. A high-stakes cocktail of business, diplomacy, technology, and espionage, The Philosopher Fish is, at its heart, the epic story of a 250-million-year-old fish struggling to survive.

About the Author
Richard Adams Carey was born in Connecticut and educated at Harvard College. After his graduation he went to work in a northwestern saw-mill, and he has since divided his time between Alaska and New England. His previous book, Against the Tide, was a portrait of four of the last one-man, one-boat fishermen on Cape Cod. He lives in Center Sandwich, New Hampshire.


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Hard to imagine that a story about fish eggs could be "fast-paced," not to mention prophetic. But this piece of environmental journalism is both. Carey (Against the Tide, 1999, etc.) traces the rise of the caviar industry and the concomitant decline of the sturgeon. Caviar dates to at least the 13th century, when a Mogol king dined on the eggs at a monastery, though in medieval Russia caviar was not a luxury-even peasants ate the "blackberry jam of tiny globes." By the late 19th century, the taste for roe had spread to Germany, France, and the US, where it quickly achieved delicacy status and remains one of the most expensive epicurean dishes around: at Manhattan's upscale Petrossian, says Carey, two ounces of beluga caviar cost well over a hundred dollars. Just a century ago, sturgeon were everywhere, the big kid on the block in most river systems in the northern hemisphere; but now the creatures whose eggs are so delectable have been overfished and are on the brink of extinction. Carey introduces scientists, entrepreneurs, and activists who are trying hard to keep the sturgeon around, though as is often the case with environmental policy, red tape and competing interests mean slow progress. A long tousle over the status of beluga sturgeon under the Endangered Spices Act culminated in 2004 with the listing of the fish as threatened, but the fate of beluga caviar imports to the US is still up in the air. In relating all this, Carey introduces some charming characters, from Petrossian's head buyer, Eve Vega, to crusading lawyer biologist Frank Chapman. As for the subtitle, don't be skeptical: this really is a book about desire. It's about how Americans balance supply and demand, how "wediscipline ourselves to measure our desires against finite means." As such, it's a book about America in microcosm. Caviar, it turns out, is not just tasty. In Carey's hands, it's luminous.


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