Working Waterfront

Shetterly’s Seaweed Chronicles explores history of plunder

Review by Carl Little One April day some 25 years ago, fine mesh fyke nets suddenly appeared in the estuary that leads to the Somesville Mill Pond. The market for elvers—glass eels favored by Japanese diners—had exploded, with astronomical per-pound prices driving the new fishery. As they had with urchins,… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

In ‘Searching for Stars,’ physicist tackles perennial problems

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine,by Alan Lightman; Pantheon Books, New York, 2018 Review by Dana Wilde More than 60 years ago, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow stirred up an intellectual hornets nest in a magazine article, “The Two Cultures.” Science and the humanities, he said,… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Anxiety rises over battered coasts, battered communities

Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore By Elizabeth Rush (2018; Milkweed Editions) Reviewed by Tina Cohen Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore brings readers to places along America’s edges where life is changing. These places are being redefined by rising sea levels, by storms battering coasts, and by… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

The ‘priestess of nature’ who took on the ‘elixirs of death’

By Tom Walsh If you don’t know much—or even anything at all—about Rachel Carson, here’s your chance. The Library of America recruited the help of editor Sandra Steingraber in recently publishing a new retrospective on marine biologist Rachel Carson and her seminal role in jump-starting environmentalism in post-World War II… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

‘Into the Raging Sea’ details human failings that cursed El Faro

Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking ofEl Faro By Rachel Slade (HarperCollins, 2018) Reviewed by Tina Cohen In October 2015, the El Faro, a 790-foot American container ship owned and operated by TOTE Maritime, sank off the Bahamas, claiming the lives of all 33 crew, including… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Lubec man’s war experiences, philosophy drive memoir

As I approach 60, I’ve adopted a new understanding of memory. As a younger man, I believed memories were accessed by traveling back along a road—to get to those teen years, I had to travel the distance through my 20s. Today, I am convinced that memories are spokes on a… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

A city’s eternal force through the years as seen in paint

“Casco Bay Ferry Reflection,” by Sarah Knock Paintings of Portland by Carl Little and David Little DownEast Books, Lanham, Md., 2018; 140 pages, hardcover, $29.95. "Portland gets its hooks in people," Jim Smethurst said to me one sunlit afternoon in 1978, “and won't let them leave." We were standing on Middle… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

A trust in land and sea: Ben Emory’s commitment to the Maine coast

Sailor for the Wild: On Maine, Conservation and Boats By Ben Emory; Seapoint Books, 2017 When Ben Emory completed Navy active duty in 1969—he had served on the destroyer USS New, providing gunfire support along the coast of Vietnam—he took stock of his life. A graduate of Harvard where he majored… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Campagnoli’s Home Stretch is Midcoast lyric gothic

Early in Michael Campagnoli’s The Home Stretch: a cycle of poems, a poem titled “If We’re Not A Dream We’re Nothing” sketches, in 13 short lines, the bleakness and bareness of a November apple orchard, where the migrant pickers have come and gone and all that’s left is “empty trees …… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Reading the ‘priestess of nature’ who took on the ‘elixirs of death’

By Tom Walsh If you don’t know much—or even anything at all—about Rachel Carson, here’s your chance. The Library of America recruited the help of editor Sandra Steingraber in recently publishing a new retrospective on marine biologist Rachel Carson and her seminal role in jump-starting environmentalism in post-World War II… SEE MORE