The Mississippi Gulf Coast Seafood Industry

The Mississippi Gulf Coast Seafood Industry is a unique and appealing work that gets inside its subject through stories of immigration and labor, while also covering business, technology, government, and global economics. Telling a people's history that concentrates on Polish Americans, African Americans, Croatians, Cajuns, and Vietnamese, Deanne Love Stephens tells the story of the seafood industry through the lives of individuals, often in their own words. The book is thorough, humane, and well illustrated. The Mississippi Gulf Coast Seafood Industry is the definitive work on the subject of coastal seafood culture and industry in Mississippi and will appeal to anyone interested in the topic. In The Mississippi Gulf Coast Seafood Industry, Deanne Love Stephens has filled an important gap in the economic, industrial, and cultural history of Mississippi and the Gulf Coast. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Stephens carefully collected the oral histories that made this book possible and wove them into a narrative of the diverse group of migrants and immigrants who built the seafood industry and changed the culture of the area and, in the process, adds significantly to the historiography. The Mississippi Gulf Coast Seafood Industry: A People’s History adds to an overall understanding of how the Mississippi Coast came to be its twenty-first-century self. The Coast’s seafood story, in the past, has been told in bits and pieces, but with Deanne Love Stephens's latest book, we get a broader understanding of how oysters and shrimp shaped a region that continues to lure diners and sports fishermen as well as to maintain a local fleet and farming experiments to keep seafood viable in challenging times. To appreciate the storytelling and history in this book, you don’t have to be a former shrimper like me. After all, seafood and its history are important to all of us who visit or call the Mississippi Coast home.