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Chargement... Highlinerspar William McCloskey
   Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  ecw0647 | Oct 8, 2017 |  aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Appartient à la série
Highliners are the elite of the fishing world, the skippers and crews who make the biggest catches--salmon, king crab, halibut, shrimp--and deliver them first to the bustling canneries of Kodiak and Dutch Harbor. For these men--and for their women--the safe eight-hour day does not exist. It never will. Some fishermen get rich, many die broke. But they find a special joy in their work that can never be matched by the easier world of the landsman. No matter how great the hardship or how bad the storm, the highliners put out to sea in their primitive battle against the elements. The protagonist of the novel is Hank Crawford, a young greenhorn who first comes to Alaska to work in a cannery to earn money while on summer vacation from college. He is quickly hooked by the fisherman's life, and this novel re-creates how a young man becomes a highliner. He succeeds because he is young enough, strong enough, and brave enough. He learns the brutal business from hard-fisted skippers, penny-pinching cannery managers, and the pirates of the fishing world. Hank also meets the tough women who endure the hardships of Alaska alongside their men. Journey with him as he learns to survive the elements (100-mile-an-hour winds, ice storms, tidal waves, and fire at sea) and attempts to become a highliner. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (4)
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4
The book is an interesting combination of fiction and non-fiction alternating chapters as McCloskey follows the career of Hank, college graduate and Vietnam veteran , who falls in love with fishing (for some unfathomable reason) in Alaskan waters for a variety of species. We're treated to a section on each kind of boat and species as Hank learns the skills needed for each finally (after being injured by the smashing force of a Halibut tail --I had no idea...-- they can weigh up to 400 lbs.) as submanager of a cannery, a job that displays all the intricate details of the operation and the vast quantity of material that is processed (millions of cans of salmon during an eight-week season) with the concomitant problems of managing people who don't want to be managed. He ends up as skipper on a boat so we get to see the business from that end as well. (The scenes of the boats icing up are tense and scary.)
Being a bit bizarre myself, I found the mix of technology and culture to be fascinating.
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