A charming fish tale and a pretty gift for your favorite seafood cook or fishing monomaniac. But in the last analysis it s a bitter ecological fable for our time. -Los Angeles Times An unexpected energetic look at world history via the humble cod fish from the bestselling author of Salt and The Basque History of the World Cod is the biography of a single species of fish but it may as well be a world history with this humble fish as its recurring main character. Cod it turns out is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod frozen and dried in the frosty air then broken into pieces and eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again sold salted by the Basques an enigmatic people with a mysterious unlimited supply of cod. As we make our way through the centuries of cod history we also find a delicious legacy of recipes and the tragic story of environmental failure of depleted fishing stocks where once their numbers were legendary. In this lovely thoughtful history Mark Kurlansky ponders the question: Is the fish that changed the world forever changed by the world s folly? Every once in a while a writer of particular skill takes a fresh seemingly improbable idea and turns out a book of pure delight. Such is the case of Mark Kurlansky and the codfish. -David McCullough