Mark Kurlansky. (2007). The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. Random House Publishing Group.

Mark Kurlansky. 2007. The Big Oyster: History On the Half Shell. Random House Publishing Group.

Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History On the Half Shell. Random House Publishing Group, 2007.

Mark Kurlansky. The Big Oyster: History On the Half Shell. Random House Publishing Group, 2007.

OverDrive Product Record

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History on the Half Shell

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1. • value: Food
2. • value: Oysters
3. • value: Historical
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8. • value: society
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14. • value: Science
15. • value: American
16. • value: NYC
17. • value: Social History
18. • value: Oyster
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20. • value: Environment
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23. • value: History
24. • value: new york city
25. • value: historic
26. • value: cultural history
27. • value: food and drink
28. • value: USA
29. • value: food history
30. • value: non fiction books
31. • value: nonfiction books
32. • value: microhistory
33. • value: history books
34. • value: History book
35. • value: books about history
36. • value: historical non fiction
37. • value: books about history for adults
38. • value: historical non fiction books
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Kurlansky, Mark
   • bioText: Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling and James A. Beard Award—winning author of Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Salt: A World History, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, and The Basque History of the World, as well as Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue (his debut novel), and several other books. He lives in New York City.
   • name: Mark Kurlansky

imprint

Random House

publishDate

2007-01-09T00:00:00-05:00

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title

The Big Oyster

fullDescription

Before New York City was the Big Apple, it could have been called the Big Oyster. Now award-winning author Mark Kurlansky tells the remarkable story of New York by following the trajectory of one of its most fascinating inhabitants–the oyster, whose influence on the great metropolis remains unparalleled.
For centuries New York was famous for its oysters, which until the early 1900s played such a dominant a role in the city’s economy, gastronomy, and ecology that the abundant bivalves were Gotham’s most celebrated export, a staple food for the wealthy, the poor, and tourists alike, and the primary natural defense against pollution for the city’s congested waterways.
Filled with cultural, historical, and culinary insight–along with historic recipes, maps, drawings, and photos–this dynamic narrative sweeps readers from the island hunting ground of the Lenape Indians to the death of the oyster beds and the rise of America’s environmentalist movement, from the oyster cellars of the rough-and-tumble Five Points slums to Manhattan’s Gilded Age dining chambers.
Kurlansky brings characters vividly to life while recounting dramatic incidents that changed the course of New York history. Here are the stories behind Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg and Robert Fulton’s “Folly”; the oyster merchant and pioneering African American leader Thomas Downing; the birth of the business lunch at Delmonico’s; early feminist Fanny Fern, one of the highest-paid newspaper writers in the city; even “Diamond” Jim Brady, who we discover was not the gourmand of popular legend.
With The Big Oyster, Mark Kurlansky serves up history at its most engrossing, entertaining, and delicious.

gradeLevels

1. • value: Grade 10
2. • value: Grade 11
3. • value: Grade 12

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Alice Waters
   • content: "In his portrait of the once-famous oyster beds of New York Harbor, Kurlansky beautifully illustrates food's ability to connect us deeply to our particular place in the world, and shows how our nourishment is so vitally tied to the health of the natural world."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Nathaniel Philbrick, National Book Award--winning author of In the Heart of the Sea
   • content: "Mark Kurlansky has done it again. The Big Oyster is a zesty love song to a bivalve and a city--intelligent, informative, and impossible to put down."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Boston Globe
   • content: "Memorable, essential, and in its own way wondrous."
4. • premium: False
   • source: San Francisco Chronicle
   • content: "Bright writing and, most gratifyingly, an enveloping narrative."
5. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "This eminently readable book is a new tool for scanning world history."
6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from September 26, 2005
     Here's a chatty, free-wheeling history of New York City told from the humble perspective of the once copious, eagerly consumed, now decimated eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginicas
     ). Research addict Kurlansky (Cod
     , etc.) starts from the earliest evidence of Lenape oyster middens, or beds, discovered by explorer Henry Hudson and others as evidence that natives enjoyed the shellfish as a delicacy, much as the Europeans did. When the Dutch arrived, the estuary of the lower Hudson, with its rich confluence of rivers, contained 350 square miles of oyster beds—"fully half of the world's oysters." The huge oyster stores contributed mightily to the mercantile wealth and natural renown of New Amsterdam, then inherited by the British, who were crazy about oysters; pickled oysters became an important trade with British West Indies slave plantations. While cheap, oysters appealed equally to the rich and poor, prompting famous establishments such as black-owned Downing's oyster cellar and Delmonico's (the enterprising author handily supplies historic recipes). The exhaustion of the city's oyster beds and pollution by sewage effectively eclipsed the consumption of local oysters by the 1920s, yet the lowly oyster still promotes the health of the waterways by its natural filtering system as well as indicating the purity of the water. Kurlansky's history digresses all over the place, and sparkles. Agent, Charlotte Sheedy.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 3, 2006
     Who knew that New York City was once the oyster capital of the world, and that at one time it held half of the earth's supply, harvesting 700 million in 1880 alone? Or that oysters were not just a delicacy for aristocrats but also affordable, cheap even, sustenance for working folk. Tom Stechschulte's pairing with Kurlansky's (Salt
     , Cod
     ) ode to the heyday of the Crassostrea virginicas
     (the eastern oyster) is a dead-on perfect match. With an authoritative yet amiable tone and sounding very much like Gene Hackman, Stechschulte delivers the information in as calm and instructive, yet wholly engaging way. The Big Oyster
     is a cautionary tale of man's nature, which lays waste to any exploitable resource, with conservation always a tardy afterthought. Stechschulte's fine reading entertains while educating about how New York City, once known for its oysters and concretely connected to the sea, slowly becomes an island unto itself, losing its connection to its surrounding waterways completely and, along the way, lost some of its unique identity to the name of progress. Simultaneous release with the Ballantine hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 26, 2005).

popularity

215

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1. • value: Cooking & Food
2. • value: History
3. • value: Nonfiction

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shortDescription

Before New York City was the Big Apple, it could have been called the Big Oyster. Now award-winning author Mark Kurlansky tells the remarkable story of New York by following the trajectory of one of its most fascinating inhabitants–the oyster, whose influence on the great metropolis remains unparalleled.
For centuries New York was famous for its oysters, which until the early 1900s played such a dominant a role in the city’s economy, gastronomy, and ecology that the abundant bivalves were Gotham’s most celebrated export, a staple food for the wealthy, the poor, and tourists alike, and the primary natural defense against pollution for the city’s congested waterways.
Filled with cultural, historical, and culinary insight–along with historic recipes, maps, drawings, and photos–this dynamic narrative sweeps readers from the island hunting ground of the Lenape Indians to the death of the oyster beds and the rise of America’s...

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