THE LAST FISH TALE:

The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town.

Mark Kurlansky. Ballantine. 304 pages. $25.

Mark Kurlansky wants you to care about Gloucester, Mass., an embattled, spunky fishing town of about 30,000 people, 30 miles north of Boston on Cape Ann. By the time you've finished reading his new book, you will.

The Last Fish Tale puts a human face -- often tragic, sometimes humorous, always eminently readable -- on the town's diminishing commercial fishing industry and its culture, one that took 400 years to build, Kurlansky notes, and one that could be wiped out in just a few decades. If the industry disappears, all of civilization will suffer, he writes, just as habitats -- say, fishing banks -- are impacted when one of their species disappears.

As depicted by Kurlansky, Gloucester is made up of hard-working, fun-loving residents with brains and brawn who respect their heritage and value traditions. ''Gloucester is a town, officially a city, with such a strong sense of itself that the town name is frequently used as an adjective -- it's a very Gloucester way of speaking.'' The town has a genre of stories, even. There are ''fish tales,'' which exaggerate and are ''triumphal,'' and their opposite, ''Gloucester stories,'' full of misery and sad endings.

Tracing the rich history of the town from its beginnings to the height of its groundfishing industry from the 1850s to the 1920s, to its teetering status today, Kurlansky relates the rollercoaster of its prosperity, depressions and rebounds. Fishing grounds are no longer fruitful. Government regulations infringe on fishermen's traditional independence. He also examines are environmental concerns, pressures and politics and the town's relatively recent appeal as a Boston suburb where locals are finding they can't afford their own homes. Only someone of Kurlansky's caliber could spin all this into a mesmerizing tale, complete with photographs, old-timers' recipes and his own line drawings.

Kurlansky's knack for selecting just the right story to illustrate his points is impressive. The book opens with a scene of the annual pole-walking contest, in which fishermen, many of them in drag, go from party to party, house to house, eat and drink alcohol to excess and then ``take a boat out to an off-shore platform and walk a forty-foot pole covered with a thick, gloppy cushion of grease, try to grab the flag at the end; and whether they succeed or fail, fall a dangerous two or three stories, depending on the tide, to the frigid June sea below. . . . It is generally recognized that to be a successful pole walker a contestant must be tremendously brave, extremely agile, and extraordinarily drunk.''

That image sets the stage for a story of a town of feisty fishermen who have prevailed through tragedy. Kurlansky's interviews with townsfolk are dead-on and illuminating. One townsman, referring to what he terms the ''Nantucketization of Cape Ann,'' laments, ''Once you let it go you can never get it back.'' A fisherman, asked why he came out of retirement, says, ``I always said I would go back if I didn't have to make a living at it. Now you can't.''

The townsfolk have a twist on an old proverb: ''If you give a man a fish, you feed him. If you teach a man to fish, he will starve.'' Yet those who still fish from Gloucester, once the fish-stick source of the world and so much more than that, ''have done so with a wily ability to adapt to a constantly changing set of rules,'' Kurlansky writes. Once you finish this fine book, you'll hope they will continue.

Amy Canfield is a freelance writer in Portland, Me.

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