Books about Shrimper from Amazon.com

When Diane Wilson, fourth-generation shrimp-boat captain and mother of five, learns that she lives in the most polluted county in the United States, she decides to fight back. She launches a campaign against a multibillion-dollar corporation that has been covering up spills, silencing workers, flouting the EPA, and dumping lethal ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride into the bays along her beloved Texas Gulf Coast. In an epic tale of bravery, Wilson takes her fight to the courts, to the gates of the chemical plant, and to the halls of power in Austin. Along the way she meets with scorn, bribery, character assassination, and death threats. Finally Wilson realizes that she must break the law to win justice: She resorts to nonviolent disobedience, direct action, and hunger strikes. Wilson's vivid South Texas dialogue resides somewhere between Alice Walker and William Faulkner, and her dazzling prose brings to mind the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, replete with dreams and prophecies..
Price: $7.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this rollicking memoir, Diane Wilson—a Texas Gulf Coast shrimper and the author of the highly acclaimed An Unreasonable Woman—takes readers back to her childhood in rural Texas and into her family of Holy Rollers. By night at tent revivals, Wilson gets religion from Brother Dynamite, an ex-con who finds Jesus in a baloney sandwich and handles masses of squirming poisonous snakes under the protection of the Holy Ghost. By day, Wilson scratches secret messages to Jesus into the paint on her windowsill and lies down in the middle of the road to see how long she can sleep in between passing trucks.
Holy Roller is a fast-paced, hilarious, sometimes shocking experience readers won’t soon forget. It is the prequel to Wilson’s first book, telling the story of the Texas childhood of a fierce little girl who will grow up to become An Unreasonable Woman, take on Big Industry, and win. One of the best Southern writers of her generation, Wilson’s voice twangs with a style and accent all its own, as true and individual as her boundless originality and wild youth..
Price: $12.34 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Fisheries issues have been attracting increasing media attention in the wake of contamination scares, controversies over new government regulations, and environmental concerns about coastal zone management--especially the loss of wetlands, coastal erosion, pollution, and overfishing.

Scrutinizing the people, policies, institutions, and issues tied to the shrimping industry in Mississippi, Paul Durrenberger provides this first examination ever of the complexities of an American fishing industry in a single geographical area. He presents an analysis of one elaborate system--from the toils and turmoils of the people who catch the shrimp to the quandaries facing the policymakers who try to regulate them.

The shrimping industry, he contends, occurs on a series of interrelated levels and dimensions and is influenced by the ideas and actions of shrimpers, processors, fisheries managers, bureaucrats, creditors, environmentalists, and scientists. It is also one segment of a wider social, political, economic, and environmental totality.

At a local level Durrenberger investigates the impact of competition from Vietnamese refugees, rivalry between bay and gulf fishermen, an escalating overpopulation of shrimpers in general, and wide-spread resistance to costly, federally mandated devices designed to save sea turtles. Exploring how the industry is increasingly bound to the global economy, he illuminates the threat to the livelihoods of independent shrimpers from ever increasing imports.

Durrenberger assesses the adequacy of folk models of shrimpers and policymakers alike. Decisions about the industry's future, he argues, must be based on valid data and realistic expectations. Too often policies are derived from untested folk models--concepts formulated by participants to justify or rationalize rather than explain what they do.

Based on detailed interviews, Gulf Coast Soundings will be a valuable resource for anthropologists, policymakers, public administrators, resource managers, sociologists, biologists, and anyone involved or interested in the economic and environmental future of the Gulf Coast, or more generally, in fisheries and coastal areas..
Price: $17.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]