Mark Kurlansky has written 40 books, but he’s best known for “Cod” and “Salt,” two works in which he looked at common food items with fresh eyes. He has a signature gift for inviting readers to consider the familiar in new ways, which is why “Cod” and “Salt” became bestsellers.

Kurlansky is up to something similar in “The Boston Way,” his new book about how 19th-century pacifists navigated the prospect of an American civil war to end slavery. Hundreds of books have been written about the Civil War, but Kurlansky breathes new life into the subject by taking a more novel slant. He focuses on a subset of Americans in and around Boston who saw slavery as an unmitigated evil, but were horrified by the thought that their fellow citizens might try to settle the matter by killing each other.

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