The United States is far from a monoculture of like-minded people who worship at the generic altars of Wal-Mart, Starbucks and Applebee's. The surprising existence of subcultures in our fair land has been nonfiction's delightful diamonds in the rough. Most memorable are books such as Dennis Covington's "Salvation on Sand Mountain," which lifted the curtain on Appalachian snake handlers and strychnine sippers, and Tom Shachtman's "Rumspringa" which vividly showcased the rowdier side of Amish youth.

At the top of the list add Rory Nugent's "Down at the Docks," a bare-knuckled, take-no-prisoners account of the men and women who live, work and hang out dockside at New Bedford, Mass. Nugent, a sailor who is no stranger to saltwater and shipwrecks, has captured America's greatest fishing fleet by compiling a half-dozen chapters filled with some the finest stories you will ever read in print. "Down at the Docks" is the song Jimmy Buffett wishes he could write.

The overall picture is America in decline, its glorious boom times ground down to rusting hulks of idle machinery, its industrious workforce on the hustle to make ends meet, legally and often otherwise. The only solace is out on the sea itself.

The waterfront has always been its own community, separate from the town itself. "The sailors' part of town," Nugent writes, "is chockablock with warehouses, fish houses, flophouses, cathouses, crack and powder houses, tenements, mill building after mill building, bars, low-slung shops, a few restaurants, trucks and truck depots, marine gear suppliers and manufacturers, boats in the water, boats out of the water, boats half in the water and rotting in place ... "

Meet Hake, Mr. Jinx himself, a man to stay clear of if you value your life. Hake has been a crewman on five fishing boats that went down; on three of them there were fatalities. Hake's last disaster was on the Bering Sea out of Dutch Harbor. When the Coast Guard found him lifeless in the icy water surrounded by his frozen comrades, they toe-tagged him at the morgue. But a doctor miraculously found a pulse. Yet no one is exactly glad to see him back in New Bedford. Capt. Creedon takes a wide berth.

"They say he's cursed, your man, there, Creedon reports.

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Down at the Docks

"Do you believe it?

"Every word and more, he answers. Your man, there, is a jinx, a real Jonah. And they don't come worse than what's inside that parcel, return address: hell."

The last thing Creedon heard about Hake was that he had found work in Florida, on a cruise ship.

Stephen J. Lyons' book on Cedar Rapids and the flood of 2008, "The 1,000-Year Flood: Destruction, Loss, Rescue, and Redemption Along the Mississippi River," will be published next year by Globe Pequot Press.