The fisher king

Hayley Kelsey

Book - 2011

What does it mean to your identity to do your job so well that you put yourself out of work? Who owns the sea--the public or the watermen who work it and know it best? What connotes possession--paying taxes or sweat equity? How do you regulate a commons in a free market economy? How do you provide for the next generation while simultaneously leaving an inheritance to it?These are some of the questions posed in The Fisher King, a novel about the complex dilemma of overfishing. Patriarch “King” Kingsley has continued a time-honored tradition, but by doing his job too well he and other watermen have emptied the Chesapeake Bay and destroyed their livelihoods. Control over the last great natural resource--the untamed ocean--is the fiercely c...ontested prize that pits three brothers, their father, and a fishing tradition against each other. During one summer’s devastating drought, tensions escalate until everyone squares off in the legislature--brother against brother, and father against son--as the fate of the fragile watershed, family, and island community hangs in the balance. more