Reviewed by Kelly Stewart

In the early 17th century, Dutch explorers found the perfect place to settle – the site of present-day New York City. Settlers described New York as verdant, with chirping birds, sweet air, and oysters freshly plucked from the Hudson River estuary. Four hundred years later, the water in New York harbor is so fetid that oysters can’t breathe and nobody swims there anymore. In his book The Big Oyster, Mark Kurlansky shows us what went wrong. In prior books, Kurlansky has investigated cod, salt and the year 1968. Now he turns his microscope on New York history and the shellfish that obsessed the city’s denizens for hundreds of years.

Although The Big Oyster is essentially a history book, Kurlansky keeps the subject matter lively by weaving interesting tidbits into the tale. Readers learn that oysters were so readily available and inexpensive that they were the favored foods of both the poor and rich (including one socialite who would eat a dozen as an appetizer). The oyster business was also a boon to free Blacks, who started their own operations on Staten Island. Sometimes, however, Kurlansky goes off on tangents, spending long paragraphs discussing topics – such as the origin of the word “cookie” – which have nothing to do with oysters. The book also includes nearly three dozen recipes for oysters, when a handful would suffice.

The most powerful passages in The Big Oyster focus on how the pristine estuary – which the oysters’ filtering systems kept clean – became a garbage dump for the city’s rapidly growing population. In the early twentieth century, “sewage could be seen among the [summertime] swimmers and sometimes children would emerge covered in filth,” Kurlansky writes. Oysters, which once tasted pleasantly briny, turned foul. New York became disconnected from the sea, and in 1927 the city’s last oyster bed closed. “Perhaps,” Kurlansky concludes, “[New York] is not just unnatural but a threat to nature. Perhaps that many people just won’t fit. After all, that is not what estuaries are designed for.”

Kurlansky plucked interesting details out of his research for this book, but he doesn’t string together a narrative that makes the reader eager to find out what happens next. The Big Oyster suffers the fate of many single-subject books: it’s a compilation of facts rather than a story.