The editors of this useful book are both recipients of the prestigious Pew Fellowships In Marine Conservation, and the book arose from a Pew Foundation workshop. However, although readers will appreciate this origin, the Preface is very short and does not make explicit a clear rationale for the book (i.e. why it is needed) and it does not explain the logic behind the book structure and the selection of authors. This might not matter too much if it met its stated aim of providing a supplementary text for fishery students that surveys recent developments. While definitely presenting simulating, relevant and valuable material, the book suffers from a number of problems which means that, in my opinion, it could do better in meeting that aim.

The book consists of 14 chapters: an introduction and conclusion sandwich two main sections; one on small-scale artisanal fisheries and one covering what are termed ‘meso-scale’ fisheries. The black and white illustrations are clear, if rather sparse for a book aiming to grab students' attention, but it is well produced by Blackwell. At about US$ 200, it falls into the ‘expensive’ book category in the North American market and, libraries apart, unfortunately it might therefore be somewhat inhibited from reaching its intended target students. The Pew Foundation might have been encouraged to provide a publication subsidy, as has been done for other Blackwell books to enable them to better reach student audiences.

The introductory chapter (by Defoe, MacClanahan and Castilla) sets out to cover the history and basics of fishery management. In my opinion, it is not a good opener for the book as I found it incomplete, terse and sometimes inaccurate. And despite a solid description of social issues, long neglected in fishery management, I was not inspired by a fresh perspective as plangent as that in Walters and Martell's (Reference Walters and Martell2004) recent volume: in this chapter, the sacred cows are still happily mooing.

The book continues with eight case studies covering small-scale artisanal fisheries, in many ways the strongest set of contributions. Alongside chapters on Chilean sea urchins, Argentine scallops, Kenyan coral reefs, and Aboriginal fisheries for turtles and dugong in northern Australia, we find an account of South African subsistence fisheries, operated by dismayingly poor disadvantaged fishers in coastal communities (Harris, Branch, Clark and Sibiya). It seems the jury is still out whether the complex series of changes to management since Apartheid fell are working to make resources more sustainable. A fascinating study (Wells, Samoilys, Anderson, Kalombo and Malokoweka) of small-scale fisheries in northern Tanzania documents efforts made to involve local communities to establish some sort of management, so far with a disappointing rebuilding of overfished resources. Massive uncontrolled depletions in Philippine fisheries (White, Gomez, Alcala and Russ, and fully described in Silvestre & Luna Reference Silvestre and Luna2004) similarly hold out rather dim rays of hope. Finally, Castilla, Gelcich and Defoe write an instructive history of the notorious Chilean ‘loco’ fishery. The ‘loco’ is a littoral snail whose foot is sold into the voracious international abalone market and is so valuable that illegal catches, like those of abalone, have abounded, while mafia-style gangs control much of the trade.

In the next section of the book, the term ‘meso-scale’ in its heading is not defined and does not appear in the index, which is all the more baffling because this section includes chapters on Australian fisheries for prawns and rock lobster, and some inshore eastern Canadian fisheries, most of which would normally be considered as straight-forward commercial fisheries with total annual catches of around a quarter of a million tonnes. It includes a chapter (Livingston and Sullivan) on the history of New Zealand's deep water hoki fishery (Macruronus, also called grenadier), recently given a controversial Marine Stewardship Council approval.

In the concluding chapter written by the editors, headed ‘Healing fisheries’, the phrase ‘The status of the world's fisheries is worrying . . .’ is a good start and sets the tone for the book and this synoptic chapter. If students are a target audience, then there might be some mention that there is a forceful opposing view (see for example Hilborn Reference Hilborn2006), although personally I am on record as being convinced that the worldwide picture is dismal (Pitcher Reference Pitcher2001). It is easy to be critical of remedies for this sad situation because there is not a lot of evidence that anything much has really worked yet (except perhaps ITQs, in highly-regulated commercial fisheries, in some places). Indeed, one lesson from reading this book is that the fact must be faced that community-based management initiatives have yet to show the kind of improvements to sustainability that many have been hoping for. And the trade-offs that many consider to be integral to implementing ecosystem-based fishery management (EBFM) are not well brought out in the book. Moreover, an idiosyncratic and rather limited choice of supporting references in many parts of the book misses a number of recent ‘fishery classics’ and therefore restricts its usefulness to students. More important, many recent developments are barely mentioned and are not well explained (for example Bayesian inference, decision analysis, ecosystem simulations, smart resource mapping, rapid appraisal techniques, fisher-led resource sampling, cheap high-tech resource monitoring, bycatch reduction, estimation and control of illegal fishing). On the positive side, the book contains a set of fascinating case studies of some small–scale fisheries that are often not well represented in the mainstream fishery literature. The book concludes with a perspective from Jeremy Prince (Reference Prince2003), looking forward to an era of ‘barefoot fishery ecologists’ who, together with fishers acting in their own interest of sustainability, can rescue (‘heal’) fisheries from their current dire straits. It would have been stimulating to have heard more of these expert contributors’ and editors’ views on how Prince's ideas might be implemented.