3.5
Mark Kurlansky likes to take a subject (like salt, cod, or even oysters) and after thoroughly researching, divulge all of the details in a historical background.
Kurlansky instructs the reader in all things relating to oysters in New York. He does touch on oysters grown in other locations, like the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay where I grew up seeing crews of small wooden work boats using large tongs to dredge up oysters.

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I would have liked to have heard a little more about modern day oyster men and their stories. It is hard work in hard conditions:

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I grew up crabbing with my brothers and cousins, but we never tried tonging for oysters. Evidently, tourists can participate, but I have never seen this:

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Kurlansky supplies many recipes and almost makes me think I might like to eat them again.

Oysters Rockefeller:
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Kurlansky then launches into the problem of the heavily polluted waters of New York. That was in back of my mind throughout this book. The oyster is a natural filtration system for the water, but the New York waters were too polluted and the oysters themselves contained dangerous chemical toxins.

The effort to clean up the waters and oysters is discussed, but you won't see me eating any raw oysters!

Cheers!
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I bet this guy had a few beers first!

fascinating ecological and social history of the oyster as compared to the social history and growth of NYC. once again my main man Mark is brilliant. makes you think and look closely at how a species existence and relationship to humans can evolve alongside human social history

Better premise than execution. An overview of New York history as seen through the oyster (or, better, the history of the oyster as seen through the lens of one city). Its great moments come from some fun historical oddities--e.g., the discovery of a new oyster bed is such major news that it makes the front page of the NYT. It sent me running to the Oyster Bar for a feed but otherwise didn't live up to my expectations.

The first half of this book was so fun to read. It chronicled the beginning of New York and the importance of the oyster to the Lenape, then the Dutch, then the early Americans.

The second half got a bit dry with page after page of old oyster recipes and anecdotes about the oyster house clientele. Each of these anecdotes alone could be interesting, but they did not contribute to any overall storyline or message for the book.

The fatal flaw of this book is the author’s argument that New York is an abomination because it was beautiful before it was settled and there are too many people: “Perhaps it is not just unnatural but a threat to nature. Perhaps that many people just won’t fit. After all, that is not what estuaries were designed for.”
If people are not in New York, where would he prefer them to be? It seems far more environmentally friendly to have a city like New York rather than converting more land into sprawling suburbs that require every resident to own cars to get around. The tragedy of creating a city in a naturally beautiful area is also lost on me. To me, it seems that there are many reasons why New York was a suitable place for a city and the only evidence offered in this book for why it should not be is the fact that it is an estuary. Maybe I am too optimistic about the efforts being made to clean up the harbor and bring back oysters and other wildlife, but it seems to me that it is possible for humans to inhabit a place like New York and still protect the wildlife surrounding it. If Mark's goal for this book was to convince me otherwise, then he spent far too much time on Charles Dickens' visits to New York and not nearly enough on this argument.

I must say I had rather high expectations for this book. I rather liked one of Kurlansky's earlier books - Cod - and how wrong could you go with a follow up about "the remarkable story of New York by following one its most fascinating inhabitants - the oyster"? Alas, to my chagrin, the blurb for the book was a tad misleading.

The Big Oyster starts out promisingly enough with its description of New York as a veritable Eden of oysters. According to the estimates of some biologists, NY Harbour "contained fully half of the world's oysters" and the Dutch called Ellis Island and Liberty Island Little Oyster Island and Great Oyster Island because of all the "sprawling oyster beds that surrounded them". And apparently Manhattan and its environs were strewn with shell middens - at Pearl Street (which got its name from the middens), the Rockaway Peninsula (with a particularly large one in the Bayswater section of Far Rockaway) - now covered by railroad tracks, roads, docks, etc. But NYC was apparently more than just an Eden of oysters. It was Eden, period. Looking at Manhattan today, it's a little bizarre to read the excerpts from the letters of early Dutch travellers and settlers, who described Manhattan as a land with fine meadows, woodlands, and burgeoning wildlife both on land and in the water.

Unfortunately, the Big Oyster starts to flag about a third of the way into the book. Kurlansky appears to run out of material that will allow him to convincingly weave the story of the oyster together with the history of New York. Instead, he starts to cram the book with random factoids of oysters and NY (the two tenuously but not necessarily related): food markets in Manhattan in the 18th century sold oysters! Here are some recipes for oysters that people used to cook back in the day! During the civil war, they fed the troops with oysters! Some famous people back in the day used to love oysters and would eat them in NY! Kurlansky could just as easily have (and possibly more convincingly) written a book about Meat and New York City; food markets in Manhattan in the 18th century sold meat! During the civil war, they fed the troops with meat! Some famous pp back in the day used to love steak and would eat it in NY! ooh - there's also the Meatpacking District!

On the whole, I'd only recommend this book to those who are food lit devotees AND who love anything to do with Manhattan. Otherwise, you might want to save your time and shelf space for other worthier reads.

History through a lens is so fun, especially when it’s a book as much about New York City as it is about oysters. A very enjoyable read, albeit a bit too heavy on the historical oyster recipes. In the beginning, the recipes helped to illustrate a point, but eventually they weren’t adding anything that Kurlansky wasn’t already telling us, so I found myself skipping over them.

Rating: 2/5 stars

I really went in hoping to like this book and for Kurlansky to finally be for me, but unfortunately this just wasn't it. There wasn't a clear connection between all of the information he included in this book and he went on a lot of tangents that didn't feel relevant. The ending also felt very rushed and after spending all of that time on irrelevant details it read like his editor wanting him to not make the book too long rather than a true conclusion. I also felt that there were a few places in the book where he white-washed the facts, such as his extensive description of the "benefits" of the Dutch colonizing Manhattan to the indigenous groups and saying that NYC "bought" the land for Central Park from the residents of Seneca Village. Overall, if you want to read a book with a lot of oyster recipe excerpts and tangents, then this might work better for you than it did for me.

As much about the history of New York City as it about oysters and their place in NYC's upswing as the metropolis it is today, this is another meticulously researched work of nonfiction from Kurlansky. It can get a little tedious at times, especially if you are not at all familiar with NYC and its environs so in that case, read it in small bursts. Overall I thought it a wonderful compilation of facts, factoids, and history and would recommend it to fans of the author, NYC aficionados, or perhaps the foodie in all of us.

I can’t stress enough how important this book is to me or how necessary it is for anyone who appreciates oysters, cares about wildlife and the environment, or lives in New York to read.

There is so much to the history of NY that this book wasn’t able to touch, but also so much that it did, more than I considered possible. It zooms in on oysters as a species, on their reproduction, on the ways they grow and evolve, on their taste, on their global differences and trade, and pulls back to weave in their significance to New Yorkers since the beginning of time, how they’ve been consumed and enjoyed for centuries, how they sustained those without means, to their importance to the development of NYC as we know it today. Without oysters, NYC wouldn’t grow to be this wealthy metropolis, a city obsessed with commerce, with food, with glutton. It was a source of food that was available to every person. It was affordable because it was so easily found and so much a part of NYCs land. The harbor and the rivers were rich with oysters, with lobsters, with fish, sharks, crabs, etc. Europe thirsted for NY oysters, particularly after they exhausted their own beds. New Yorkers could always depend on reaching down into waters and picking up a dinner of oysters when nothing else was left. Until the worst happened and “this unnatural city built at the cite of a natural wonder” destroyed what made it special. And this summary doesn’t at all begin to cover everything that this book was about.

I also appreciated the dives into conservation and harvesting methods, which started in the 1800s, much earlier than I expected, and at how many oysters by this point have originated in different waters and been transported elsewhere where they can thrive more fully. And so many of these oysters came from NY waters.

On top of all of that, the wealth of recipes contained in this book was amazing and gave me a glimpse into what it was like to live in the 17th-20th centuries. I mean, the overwhelming amount of oysters that used to have their homes in NY was so evident in the recipes- 50 oysters at hand! As if!

It’s an incredibly informative, exciting, humbling, and devastating book, with a rich and engaging voice. As I’m flying over NY to come back home, all I can do is look down in sorrow at the loss of the marshes, swamps, creeks, streams, that are supposed to be a part of the landscape. Oysters have influenced the world in so many ways and continue to offer hope that our waters will one day be as fresh and sweet smelling as before.

"The Big Oyster" by Mark Kurlansky is a fun and educational book about the history of New York City and oysters. It even comes with recipes! Sadly, it is also a reminder of how we humans often destroy the things we love by our greed and gluttony. Still, it would be great to time travel back to when oysters were as cheap and ubiquitous as hot dogs and pizza are today.

A laser focused history of the New York City oyster. Once considered the greatest tasting oyster in the world, now gone thanks to pollution.

Kurlansky always manages to focus his story telling whether it's the history of salt, cod, or the oyster.

I always thought not eating oysters in months without an "r" was a Southern thing. Turns out, it started in the north, New York, in what would become the United States. It was actually a law of the land in 1719. May through August is the breeding season for oysters but they are still edible and delicious.

Caesar actually developed our current calendar around the oyster breeding season placing September on the first day it was considered safe to eat them. He placed leap day in February to give an additional day to eat oysters during the season.

Lots of interesting history in this book, more than just oysters alone.