Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club

Let the adventure begin. Join the Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club led by Sean R. Corbin, a PSPL Librarian.

The group meets the 3rd Thursday of the month from 2 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. (September through May) in the Cornelia White Community Room at the Welwood Murray Memorial Library in downtown Palm Springs.

To receive meeting information and/or join the email list for the Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club, please email Sean R. Corbin in advance of the meeting.

Most titles are available as Downloadable Audiobooks and/or eBooks from PSPL.

April 16, 2026 

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

—An unexpected, energetic look at world history on sea and land from the bestselling author of Salt and The Basque History of the World

—“Every once in a while a writer of particular skill takes a fresh, seemingly improbable idea and turns out a book of pure delight. Such is the case of Mark Kurlansky and the codfish.” –David McCullough, author of The Wright Brothers and 1776

Cod, Mark Kurlansky’s third work of nonfiction and winner of the 1999 James Beard Award, is the biography of a single species of fish, but it may as well be a world history with this humble fish as its recurring main character. Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod, frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again, sold salted by the Basques, an enigmatic people with a mysterious, unlimited supply of cod. As we make our way through the centuries of cod history, we also find a delicious legacy of recipes, and the tragic story of environmental failure, of depleted fishing stocks where once their numbers were legendary. In this lovely, thoughtful history, Mark Kurlansky ponders the question: Is the fish that changed the world forever changed by the world's folly?

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