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.

The Los Angeles Times

This eminently readable book is a new tool for scanning world history. . . Cod is history filtered through the gills of the fish trade.

The New York Times

What a prodigious creature is the cod. Kurlansky's approach is intriguing-and deceptively whimsical. This little book is a work of no small consequence.

Business Week

In the end the book stands as a kind of elegy, a loving eulogy not only to a fish, but to the people whose lives have been shaped by the habits of the fish, and whose way of life is now at an end.

Newsday