Reviews for Coastal North Carolina: Its Enchanting Islands, Towns, and Communities

The average rating for Coastal North Carolina: Its Enchanting Islands, Towns, and Communities based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-02-18 00:00:00 Maggie Donaldson Daunting in its premises, grimly persuasive in its conclusions, The Disappearing Islands of the Chesapeake may induce in readers a healthy concern regarding the long-term prospects for America's largest estuary. Author William Cronin's expertise regarding the Chesapeake is formidable -- he was formerly a staff oceanographer for Johns Hopkins University's Chesapeake Bay Institute, and has been a frequent contributor to Chesapeake Bay Magazine -- and as a sailor who has explored the bay from top to bottom, he knows the Chesapeake Bay from lived experience as well as academic expertise. The book's title refers to the phenomenon of islands "disappearing" via erosion -- an event that befell the Dorchester County community of Holland Island, whose last family left the island in 1918. The vulnerability of the islands of Chesapeake Bay has been well-documented -- Cronin aptly mentions novelist James Michener, who in his book Chesapeake (1978) presents a fictional Devon Island in perpetual danger of crumbling into the bay, like Edgar Allan Poe's House of Usher sinking into the tarn -- but the situation takes on additional urgency because of climate change. If you don't believe me, check out the map on page 5; reproduced from a 2001 issue of the scholarly journal Climate Research, it shows a large part of the wetlands of Dorchester County, Maryland, disappearing beneath the waves before the end of this century. The threat to the Chesapeake is real and present. The book is not narrative in nature. Rather, Cronin takes the reader down the bay, from north to south, starting at Garrett Island where the Susquehanna River opens out into Chesapeake Bay, and ending at Jamestown Island in Virginia, where English-speaking people made their first permanent settlement in what would one day be the United States. Systematically, Cronin tells the story of each island, chronicling its ecosystem and history, always with a final note on the (often serious) extent to which the island has been reduced in size due to erosion. The Disappearing Islands of the Chesapeake is well-illustrated, with maps and photographs, both older and modern. A particular highlight in that regard is Cronin's inclusion of many photographs by A. Aubrey Bodine, the legendary Baltimore Sun photographer whose artistic gifts helped him capture in an unforgettable way the life of the Chesapeake region. Rather than seeking to read The Disappearing Islands of the Chesapeake from cover to cover, you might want to turn to those sections of the book that deal with an island that is of particular interest to you. I enjoyed reading about Garrett Island, for example, because for many years I drove over Garrett Island on U.S. Route 40's Hatem Bridge every day, on my way to my job at Cecil Community College. "What's the story with that island?" I used to wonder. Now I know. Similarly, having made countless drives along Maryland Route 100, I was glad finally to learn something about Gibson Island at the road's eastern end; the "gated island," it was set up as a strictly private community, with a guardhouse on the causeway that keeps non-residents out (though there is a way for outsiders to visit the island; if you want to know how, read the book). I also liked Cronin's account of Kent Island. It's no accident that Kent Island has that brown historical sign that you see while driving east on U.S. Route 50 after crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge -- the one that reads "First English Settlement in Maryland." True, yes, but what the sign doesn't mention is that that first English settler was a patriotic Virginian named William Claiborne, who fought long and hard (albeit unsuccessfully) to keep Kent Island in Virginia. The colorful cultures of Tangier Island and Smith Island (the latter of which is also well-explored in Tom Horton's An Island Out of Time), and the rich history of Jamestown Island, also receive thorough exploration. Many of these islands are in varying degrees of danger; a couple of them, as a final chapter explains, have already disappeared irretrievably beneath the waters of the bay. Take a close look at the book's title, on either the spine or the title page, and you will see that the word Islands is half a step lower than the rest of the title, to emphasize the ongoing danger facing the Chesapeake's islands. Near the beginning of the book, Cronin points out that "the future is open to change -- both positive and negative. Incremental decisions of governments and individuals will tip the balance one way or the other. If there remain any doubts about where the bay is headed, the history of its vanishing islands will remove them" (p. 9). From Cronin's advocacy in prose of the need to work for the preservation of the bay's ecosystem and culture, to Bodine's poetic photography, The Disappearing Islands of the Chesapeake sends a consistent message that the Bay and its islands, and their wildlife and culture, are worth preserving.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-01-10 00:00:00 BRIAN CRAWLEY An excellent book for those interested in the local history of the Chesapeake Bay. Because of the historical significance of some of the islands in the area I still found it interesting. It was also interesting in light of the number of islands that have disappeared over the years due to sea level rise ad erosion.