Four Thousand Hooks

"This is pure adventure. Dean's story is…sinewy and spare, understated and often gorgeously written."

"Four Thousand Hooks is a marvellous loss-of-innocence book, informative, enjoyable and well worth reading."

"Four Thousand Hooks has the feel of an honest memoir, valuable for its precision in describing fishing methods, crew interactions, and what Adams thought and felt..."

"His first-hand accounts come alive on the pages, where the reader is swept into the story with the narrator.... The foreshadowing and timing of the story makes it difficult to stop..."

"Four Thousand Hooks says a lot about our ability to meet extraordinary challenges, and suggests that maybe we're all stronger and more capable than we realize. [It’s] filled with fascinating details of the fishing life, makes for awfully good reading."

""The well-honed prose tells a good story and one is encouraged to turn the pages to see what happens next. This is not only a very readable book but an important record of a particular type of fishing."

"Four Thousand Hooks is one teenage boy's dramatic, yet humorous, coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of Alaskan maritime culture... a vivid picture of life and commercial fishing conditions in Alaska..."

"Four Thousand Hooks [is] one of the best books about commercial fishing in Alaska. The author began long-lining for halibut at age fifteen and went on to captain his own vessel: it is a great book for anyone interested in life on a commercial fishing vessel."

"A real—life account of a young man's first season working as a crew member on his uncle's commercial fishing boat in the 1970s. Adams tells of the drunken shore leave, the surprising gentleness and understanding between crew members, and the rough but careful teaching of any new crew member to be part of a team upon which one sometimes had to depend for one's survival."