Working Waterfront

Going deep—maybe too deep—on the lobster industry

The Last Lobster: Boom or Bust for Maine’s Greatest Fishery? By Christopher White; St. Martin’s Press, 2018 Review by Tina Cohen My review copy of The Last Lobster included some pages of promotional information provided by the publisher; one titled “Key Ideas from The Last Lobster” presented succinct bullet points. Here, on one page!… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Islesboro librarian tackles thorny question with Rose

By Tom Groening Good luck to anyone trying to market Islesboro resident Melissa Olson’s The Rose by Another Name. It features spies, murder, deception, conspiracy, and political intrigue, yet it’s not quite a thriller in the classic sense. It’s set in the 16thcentury, but it also isn’t quite a historical novel. … SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Adventures on the sea, adventures of the heart

Wayfarer: A Memoirby James S. Rockefeller Jr. (Islandport Press, 2018) Reviewed by Tina Cohen The book cover features snapshots: an airborne glider, a Friendship sloop under sail, a young man in settings connoting adventure and romance. And then there is the author’s prestigious name. But set aside attributes like wealth… SEE MORE

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

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‘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