While Spanish, German, Irish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese and especially Japanese people place Anguillae
well above salmon in their cuisines, Americans, by and large, consider eels to be bait. Thus, North American estuaries have the best remaining migratory wild eel populations; that fact provides a good foundation for a light science travelogue shuttling back and forth between eel capitals on both sides of the Atlantic. Schweid (The Cockroach Papers) tries to fill in the gaps in the eel's astonishing natural history and tie that to sketches of fishery traditions, folklore, literary excerpts and reportage (beware the natural history that includes this many ingredients), mostly by focusing on the erratic transatlantic economy that eel supply (here) and demand (there) creates. Schweid visits five of the traditional eeling waters in Europe, but mostly he's concerned with recording the yarns of North Carolina's Outer Banks eel-fishing culture, where small-scale U.S. "eelers" operating inshore catch and ship tons of wriggling eels to Europe and Japan. Schweid is searching hard for a handle on his slimy, reclusive subject, but even science is not much help: the migratory Atlantic genus has been so resistant to study that even strong commercial imperatives (immature eels have fetched $500 a pound) have not yielded a true eel aquaculture. An overview of such an enigmatic creature that ranges over a huge ocean and inshore ecology is all that can be expected from this slim book; still, anyone with a curiosity about the sea will find Schweid's taste of the eel strangely appealing. (Apr.)
