The Big Oyster

History on the Half Shell

By: Mark Kurlansky

Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte

Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

Before New York City was the Big Apple, it could have been called the Big Oyster. Now award-winning author Mark Kurlansky tells the remarkable story of New York by following the trajectory of one of its most fascinating inhabitants–the oyster, whose influence on the great metropolis remains unparalleled.

For centuries New York was famous for its oysters, which until the early 1900s played such a dominant a role in the city’s economy, gastronomy, and ecology that the abundant bivalves were Gotham’s most celebrated export, a staple food for the wealthy, the poor, and tourists alike, and the primary natural defense against pollution for the city’s congested waterways.Filled with cultural, historical, and culinary insight–along with historic recipes, maps, and drawings–this dynamic narrative sweeps listeners from the island hunting ground of the Lenape Indians to the death of the oyster beds and the rise of America’s environmentalist movement, from the oyster cellars of the rough-and-tumble Five Points slums to Manhattan’s Gilded Age dining chambers. Kurlansky brings characters vividly to life while recounting dramatic incidents that changed the course of New York history.

Here are the stories behind Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg and Robert Fulton’s “Folly”; the oyster merchant and pioneering African American leader Thomas Downing; the birth of the business lunch at Delmonico’s; early feminist Fanny Fern, one of the highest-paid newspaper writers in the city; even “Diamond” Jim Brady, who we discover was not the gourmand of popular legend. With The Big Oyster, Mark Kurlansky serves up history at its most engrossing, entertaining, and delicious.

©2006 Mark Kurlansky (P)2006 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

“In his portrait of the once-famous oyster beds of New York Harbor, Kurlansky beautifully illustrates food’s ability to connect us deeply to our particular place in the world, and shows how our nourishment is so vitally tied to the health of the natural world.”–Alice Waters

“Mark Kurlansky has done it again. The Big Oyster is a zesty love song to a bivalve and a city–intelligent, informative, and impossible to put down.”–Nathaniel Philbrick, National Book Award-winning author of In the Heart of the Sea

Fantastic book

It is an extraordinary history of NYC and the important role oysters played. Being a New Yorker and in the oyster business best book on the topic I have ever read. Good mix of history, the oyster industry and the environmental impacts.