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With its spectacular beaches and charming towns, Cape Cod is known around the world as a vacation spot and a summer retreat for the well-to-do. But there is another Cape Cod, a hidden, hardscrabble, year-round world whose hunter-gatherer economy dates back to the Bay Colony. The world of the independent fisherman is one of constant peril, of arcane folkways and expert knowledge, of calculated risk and self-reliance -- and of freedom won daily through backbreaking, solitary work. It is a way of life deep in the American grain.

Haunted by the numbers of family fishermen who have recently been forced to abandon the profession, Richard Adams Carey spent a year among a handful of men who stubbornly refuse to do so. Reminiscent of the work of William Warner and Joseph Mitchell, AGAINST THE TIDE is a masterly profile of four New England fishermen in which every page opens onto something more profound: maritime history, maritime ecology, and the poetic celebration of a special American place.

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