Working Waterfront

The tides as one step away from God

Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean By Jonathan White 2017: Trinity University Press Like the tides themselves, this book literally covers the earth. Author Jonathan White gets us started with a dramatic personal story: accidentally grounding his schooner in 1990 in Kalinin Bay, Alaska, in 40-knot winds at… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

The strange story of the North Pond hermit

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel; Knopf, 2017 For 27 years, Christopher Knight was the “North Pond Hermit.” There had been no grand plan for… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Memoir is a rumination on doing good work

A Winter Apprentice, by John Holt Willey; Polar Bear & Co., Solon, Maine, 2016; 280 pages, trade paperback, $14.95. In the summer of 1977 John Willey returned home to Maine with his wife, Barbara, who had never been that far east. His last permanent address had been San Francisco, where… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

The fall and rise of the Great Lakes is a cautionary tale

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, by Dan Egan; W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2017; 280 pages, hardcover, $27.95. The federal budget that President Trump proposed to Congress in March of this year reduces funding for practically everything in it except the military. And among federal departments,… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Moons, little islands, big names and tragedy

In the Great Green Room The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown By Amy Gary New York: Flatiron Books, 2017 Different things draw us into writing projects. Sometimes it’s a great story or a narrative that instructs or informs in some unique or unusual way. Sometimes it’s a… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Native wisdom measuring Maine, verse by verse

Booker’s Point by Megan Grumbling. Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press “Come to a fork, you gotta take/it, they say” When I was growing up on Long Island, New York, my parents hired a local man, Fred Grimshaw, to look after our property. He knew how to do everything—trim hedges,… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

‘A world of singers’ is siren for Islesford poet

At Bunker Cove. Poems by Ralph Stevens. Westbrook, Maine: Moonpie Press, 2017. 58 pp. Softbound, $14 Born during World War II to a father who was in the Navy, Ralph Stevens moved at least ten times before graduating from Lincoln Academy in Newcastle. He dropped out of college and did… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Growing up on the coast: ‘Adventures remembered enthusiastically’

The Stone From Halfway Rock: A Boy’s Adventures on the Coast of Maine By Peter Macdonald Blachly (published by Polar Bear & Company, 2016) The pages of The Stone From Halfway Rock should practically reek of salt air and ocean spray, so vividly does author Peter Macdonald Blachly, a writer… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Wulp’s poems prove wit, insight, reflection sharpen with age

Cormorant Time: A Madman’s Journal. Poems Written in a Time of Fever by John Wulp. Camden, Maine: Philip Conkling & Associates, 2016. 190 pp. “Can one man have been a United States Marine Corps honor guard at the White House, a photographer, a producer, a playwright, wait—a short-order cook, an… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Book review: National parks as ‘breathing places’

The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks. By Terry Tempest Williams When filmmaker Ken Burns set out to document the history of America’s “best idea”—our national parks—he called on a number of distinguished writers and historians to help testify to their special place in our land—and… SEE MORE