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Up In The Old Hotel and other stories
Vintage Books, Paperback, 716 pages, $16 When I found myself telling fishermen about this book, I realized that although some of the stories go back as far as 1938 – worth telling Working Waterfront readers about. Up In The Old Hotel is a compilation of four books Joseph Mitchell wrote during his illustrious career as
Cleaning the coast
Imagine wrestling a sea gull for a piece of plastic. Theresa Torrent-Ellis, who heads Coastweek, the Maine coastal cleanup program, had to. “My children saw him with the plastic in his mouth and were very concerned,” she said. “Once the gull saw that I had interest in it, of course, he was even more interested
Long Island Sound lobsters die off, again
The Maine Coast, a Maritime History
Wrapped!
“Saying ‘I’m sorry’ doesn’t even begin to cover the damage,” said lobsterman Leroy Bridges, of Deer Isle. He was talking about recreational boaters who get their boats wrapped around lobster gear and cut the buoys from the rope attached to traps on the ocean bottom. “If I were to reach in your [back] pocket and
The Basque History of the World
The Basques are one of the unique people-islands to be found on the face of the earth, completely different in every sense from the peoples around them, and their language, surrounded by Aryan languages, forms an island somehow comparable to those peaks which still surface above the water in a flood zone. This description, written
Art cache turns up in Brooksville barn
Finding a pile of paintings hidden in a barn and never before exhibited would make any art dealer’s heart skip a beat. It certainly did for Michael Connors, of Stonington’s EaGull Gallery. A woman came into his shop last year, he said, and told him she had a neighbor who was thinking of selling some
The fight for the Bagaduce
The story’s familiar: a lifelong resident gets a state permit – over the objections of some neighbors – to raise oysters in a coastal river. Two years later, another local man applies for a second permit to do much the same thing. Again, neighboring property owners object, concerned about property values, state rules they don’t
Salt: A World History
The history and understanding of the uses and properties of the many salts of this world is a subject with tentacles reaching out in every direction. This is not a book to take to the beach. Rather, it is an utterly absorbing, in-depth look at a common, everyday substance. Salt is necessary to human life
Jackson Lab expansion faces criticism
“People say the lab is an eyesore,” said Mt. Desert native and boatbuilder Ralph Stanley, speaking of opposition to a proposed expansion of Bar Harbor’s Jackson Laboratory. “It doesn’t look like an eyesore to me. It looks like security to a lot of people.” Stanley, active in several Mt. Desert historical societies and most things