Down at the Docks - Hardcover

Nugent, Rory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375420649 ISBN 13: 9780375420641

Publisher: Pantheon, 2009

Synopsis

“No writer I can think of, unless it is Sebastian Junger, might have written this obsessed, intrepid, and intelligent book.”
—Alec Wilkinson

“‘Nowhere in all America,’ wrote Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, ‘will you find more patrician-like houses, parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford.’ Not any- more. Down at the Docks is about the lives of New Bedford fishermen–man against the sea, and all that–but it is much more; it is a hard, unvarnished look at New Bedford today, where the relic commercial fishing industry is only one of the components, and where the old ways run smack into modern problems like drug-smuggling, illegal immigration, organized crime, disorganized crime, and suffocating government regulations. Melville would have been shocked to see what has become of what he called ‘the dearest place to live in, in all of New England.’ Rory Nugent tells the fascinating story of New Bedford the way it really is, not the way wistful romantics would like to remember it.”
—Richard Ellis, author of Men and Whales

About this title

About the Author

Rory Nugent is an explorer and a writer. His previous books are The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck and Drums Along the Congo. An accomplished mariner, he has sailed single-handed across the Atlantic four and a half times, his last trip ending in shipwreck.

Reviews

Instead of exploring exotic locales such as India and the Congo, as he did in his previous books (Search for the Pink-Headed Duck; Drums Along the Congo), Nugent stays close to home for a portrait of the fishing port town of New Bedford, Mass., where he lived for 17 years. With wry humor and empathy (it helps that he is a mariner himself), Nugent deftly tells the tale of a once bustling and vibrant community—the pre-eminent spot for fishing and whaling—and its decline as its fiercely independent inhabitants grapple for relevance in an increasingly globalized world. The book at first reads like a series of colorful character sketches: a junkie conman who turned to fishing after fighting in Vietnam; a jinxed fisherman whose presence on a boat indicates death to all the passengers save himself; the secretary to a secret lesbian fishing society. But the book reveals something larger as Nugent seamlessly weaves in the history of the town, its industry, drug-smuggling trade and flirtations with radical politics. (Feb.)
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Nugent, whose previous books took him to India and the Congo, describes his sometime home of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Long famous for whaling�Melville set sail from there�the city remains a major fishing port and produces the most valuable annual catch of any in the country. But in the past two decades consolidation and legislation have shackled what Nugent eulogizes as the fleet�s �frontier mentality.� This canny self-reliance took a variety of forms; Nugent documents two kinds of insurance fraud and a �night menu� of drugs smuggled to supplement the legitimate catch. Nugent strings together his subjects� boasts, banter, and laments into an engagingly anecdotal social history, fleshed out by strokes of fine description: on a windless day, boat exhaust �flattens as it exits each stack, forming oily pancakes which curl heavenward at the edges.�
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Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375420649
• ISBN 13: 9780375420641
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304