Four Thousand Hooks: A True Story of Fishing and Coming of Age on the High Seas of Alaska
Adams was 15 years old in 1972 when he signed on to the halibut schooner Grant. The boat used to be his grandfather’s before he sold it to Adams’ uncle Jack. It was a summer of firsts: first visit to a strip club, first coffee, first brush with an Irish lord (that’s not what you might think it is). It was a summer of new terminology: skate, gangion, gurdy. A kid trying to fit into a man’s world, Adams threw himself into the job the way a boy throws himself into anything new: eagerly, clumsily, and with a whole lot of good intentions but not much ability. But he learned: how to bait a string, how to clean a fish, and how to turn himself into a man like his uncle (his own father having taken a different path in life). Sort of a true-life version of William McCloskey’s Breakers (2000), a novel about commercial fisherman in Alaska in the 1970s, the book is stylishly written and full of humor, drama, and, not incidentally, life lessons. A fine coming-of-age memoir. --David Pitt