Hair of the Dog: Tales from Aboard a Russian Trawler

by Barbara Oakley

Barbara Oakley's riveting portrayal of espionage and comic adventure brings to life a littleknown episode of American history when two cold-warring nations joined together to fish in the North Pacific.

Genres: Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Barbara Oakley, PhD, a 'female Indiana Jones,' is one of the few women to hold a doctorate in systems engineering. She chronicled her adventures on Soviet fishing boats in the Bering Sea in Hair of the Dog: Tales from Aboard a Russian Trawler. She also served as a radio operator in Antarctica and rose from private to captain in the U.S. Army. Now an associate professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan, Oakley is a recent vice president of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Her work has appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times to the IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience.

Reviews

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting stories marred by a complete inability to write.

[Tom Gewecke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gave me a detailed glimpse inside life on a Russian factory trawler. Oakley's account of her time as a translator is at turns serious, funny, and insightful. She grows to appreciate the men who choose the livelihood of commercial fishing and makes deep friendships. As she experiences the ups and downs of living at sea for months at a time, she develops great respect for the commitment the captains and crew members make to sustain such an enterprise, between two great superpowers at the height of the cold war. She writes with wit and recreates many memorable scenes from her journals.

[Charles Pergiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up on a whim. Something prompted me to order a copy of Evil Genes and buying one book wasn't enough, so I bought two. It's a heck of a story. Barb got a job as a translator on a Soviet fish processing ship 30 odd years ago when a couple of guys ginned up a Soviet-American joint venture to harvest fish from American territorial waters, which had just been expanded from the old 3 mile limit to 200 miles.
Curiously, the only mention I found of this joint venture in Wikipedia is in an article about Polar Star, a murder mystery by Martin Cruz Smith. Martin is one of my favorite writers. He wrote Three Stations and Stalin's Ghost, which I have read, and Gorky Park, which I have heard of (it's famous), but never read.