Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island - Hardcover

Swift, Earl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062661396 ISBN 13: 9780062661395

Verlag: DEY STREET BOOKS, 2018

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Críticas:

"A graceful melding of history, nature writing, and perceptive cultural commentary. ... An affectionate portrait... sharply drawn and empathetic."--Kirkus Reviews

"Earl Swift is as much a master of crafting words on the page as capturing the instructive voices on this shrinking Chesapeake island. He has written not a farewell but a commencement, not an insular but a universal story, one we all should know, of challenge, forbearance, and possibilities."--JACK E. DAVIS, author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in History

"Wonderful, poetic, stirring writing. This lovely book is an elegy to a disappearing way of life."--CALLUM ROBERTS, marine conservation biologist, University of York, and author of The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea

"Chesapeake Requiem immerses us in an amazing American place. A humane and difficult and supremely reported book."--CHRISTOPHER COKINOS, director of creative writing, University of Arizona, and author of Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds

"Chesapeake Requiem is a riveting documentary. It also has the deep currents and satisfactions of a magnificent novel."--JOHN CASEY, National Book Award-winning author of Spartina

"This is a powerful book. Fascinating people, clinging loyally to a fascinating and lovely place, even as the waters rise--Earl Swift's Chesapeake Requiem is a tale of our time, movingly told. Perhaps it will inspire some of us living safe on higher ground to more action on behalf of those at risk."--BILL MCKIBBEN, author of The End of Nature

"An empathetic portrait of a small and unique community and its plight under environmental duress."--Booklist

"[Swift's] book reads as an ode to a people who are disappearing, capturing the ins and out of their everyday lives: the ways they work, speak, fight, make jokes, and vote. Taken together, Swift's descriptions suggest that Tangier might be one of the most interesting--if strangest--places in the country."--Earther

"A provocative and respectful study of a culture that may soon be lost."--Esquire, "The Best Nonfiction Books of 2018 (So Far)"

"An important book, capturing macro changes through microcosm. ... A moving account of a vanishing place."--Library Journal

Reseña del editor:

A brilliant, soulful, and timely portrait of a two-hundred-year-old crabbing community in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay as it faces extinction.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Washington Post, NPR, Outside, Smithsonian, Popular Science, Bloomberg, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Review of Books, Science Friday, and Kirkus 

"BEAUTIFUL, HAUNTING AND TRUE." — Hampton Sides ·  “GORGEOUS. A TRULY REMARKABLE BOOK.” — Beth Macy · "GRIPPING. FANTASTIC." — Outside · "CAPTIVATING." — Washington Post · "POWERFUL." — Bill McKibben · "VIVID. HARROWING AND MOVING." — Science · "A MASTERFUL NARRATIVE." — Christian Science Monitor · "THE BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR."  — Stephen L. Carter/Bloomberg

A Washington Post bestseller · An Indie Next List selection · An NPR All Things Considered and Axios "Book Club" pick

Tangier Island, Virginia, is a community unique on the American landscape. Mapped by John Smith in 1608, settled during the American Revolution, the tiny sliver of mud is home to 470 hardy people who live an isolated and challenging existence, with one foot in the 21st century and another in times long passed. They are separated from their countrymen by the nation’s largest estuary, and a twelve-mile boat trip across often tempestuous water—the same water that for generations has made Tangier’s fleet of small fishing boats a chief source for the rightly prized Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and has lent the island its claim to fame as the softshell crab capital of the world.

Yet for all of its long history, and despite its tenacity, Tangier is disappearing. The very water that has long sustained it is erasing the island day by day, wave by wave. It has lost two-thirds of its land since 1850, and still its shoreline retreats by fifteen feet a year—meaning this storied place will likely succumb first among U.S. towns to the effects of climate change. Experts reckon that, barring heroic intervention by the federal government, islanders could be forced to abandon their home within twenty-five years. Meanwhile, the graves of their forebears are being sprung open by encroaching tides, and the conservative and deeply religious Tangiermen ponder the end times.   

Chesapeake Requiem is an intimate look at the island’s past, present and tenuous future, by an acclaimed journalist who spent much of the past two years living among Tangier’s people, crabbing and oystering with its watermen, and observing its long traditions and odd ways. What emerges is the poignant tale of a world that has, quite nearly, gone by—and a leading-edge report on the coming fate of countless coastal communities.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: DEY STREET BOOKS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0062661396
• ISBN 13: 9780062661395
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448