Discouraged by the fisheries decline and logging pollution in Alaska ( Alaska Blues , 1977), the author began hauling bait herring on a 60-year-old wooden boat (the Amaretto) in Maine. Upton describes how he and a friend managed to get the Amaretto back in business in this composite account of a season of stop-seine fishing on the Maine coast, of small boats and crews doing difficult work, and of one captain who seemed able to sense fish when no one else could. But the industry is changing. Like Peter Matthiessen's Men's Lives ( LJ 5/1/86), this gracefully details the ending of a way of life, altered by forces beyond these fishers' control, after generations of little change. For public and academic libraries, especially those on the northeast coast.