The Last Fish Tale, by Mark Kurlansky

Having written bestsellers on cod, oysters and salt, Mark Kurlan-sky now turns to the people who make a living from the sea. He begins his book-length love letter to the Massachusetts fishing community of Gloucester with an account of its annual offshore greasy-pole-walking competition, where success comes to those who are "tremendously brave, extremely agile and extraordinarily drunk".

Kurlansky has an almost mystical belief in the invigorating effect of fishermen upon communities. This view is borne out by Gloucester, a place with "a strong sense of itself". It was initially settled by Welsh and Devonian immigrants, drawn by cod fisheries of prodigious richness. Sicilians followed, first providing salt for preservation, then staying to haul the nets. The salt trade was killed by the frozen foods of Gloucester resident Clarence Birdseye. Since the exploitation of the world's richest fish banks involved a round trip of 200 miles, Gloucester mariners were inconceivably tough. In the 70 years to 1900, 3,800 were lost at sea.

Though neighbouring Massachusetts communities succumbed to tourism, Gloucester remained resolutely blue-collar. Jokers called it Gloucester-by-the-smell, but artists such as Winslow Homer were drawn by the picturesque possibilities of the coastline. Writers inspired by it include TS Eliot, whose "The Dry Salvages" in Four Quartets is a threnody to those lost at sea "in the dark throat which will not reject them", and the 6ft 8in poet Charles Olson, who invented the term "post-modern".

As early as 1911, the Glouc-ester Daily Times condemned the use of beam trawlers for "destroying countless... immature fish". By the 1980s, cod numbers were severely depleted. Over 70 per cent of the fish caught on one major ground were dogfish and skate, once "trash fish". The dogfish ended up in London fish-and-chip shops, while skate was eaten in fashionable New York restaurants until it was fished out. Since then, the 500 remaining Gloucester fishermen have moved on to lobsters and less tempting slime eels, which are popular in Korea, but the future does not look rosy. Renowned for an un-American "miserable irony", locals subvert an old proverb: "If you give a man a fish, you feed him. If you teach a man to fish he will starve."

Kurlansky looks at the tension between fishermen earning a living and preservation of the species they catch. He notes that the Icelandic cod wars were another sign of the danger of innovation. Disturbingly, species do not return even when fisheries are closed: "Something huge – a massive shifting in the natural order of the planet – is occurring in the oceans."

The closest place he has found on this side of the Atlantic to Gloucester is the Cornish port of Newlyn. Its fishermen now largely depend on spider crabs sold to Spain and the revival of the pilchard or "Cornish sardine". As eight buyers bid for one haddock in Newlyn's fish market, he wonders if "this was the future of commercial fishing."

He concludes this exceptionally enjoyable book, simultaneously elevating and worrying, by insisting that the loss of fishing will diminish us all. Gradgrinds may accuse him of sentimentality, but commercial fishing brings liveliness and interest, not to mention gastronomic appeal, to coastal communities in a way that no tourist facility can begin to match.