Coastal Mainers Feel Oil Price Sting

The effects of record-high oil prices have reverberated throughout coastal Maine. This past year, the average price for a gallon of gasoline in Maine rose from $1.98 a gallon to $2.40, with a summertime spike to over $3. Heating oil similarly rose 53 cents per gallon, a thirty-five percent increase from the year before. Declining

Continue reading...


Insurance Feedback

To the editor: Thank you for writing a very important article on homeowner’s insurance on islands [WWF Feb. 06]. It needed to be written and something needs to be done. You asked for feedback from islanders regarding their experiences. Here are mine. My husband and I purchased a home by the water on Cliff Island

Continue reading...


Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm

New York: North Point Press, 2004 208 pages, $20.00 Grieving a Way of Life Loss. Transition. If they’re difficult experiences to write about, they’re also not easy reading. This book reflects on the author’s experience grieving a way of life once vital, now ended. Loved and lost. For Jane Brox, a writer living in Wiscasset,

Continue reading...


East Boothbay yard builds Navy prototype

Hodgdon Yachts in East Boothbay, along with the help of Steve Von Vogt, president of Maine Marine Manufacturing in Portland, and researchers at the University of Maine, is building a Navy medium-range craft called the Mark V.1. While the Maine boatbuilding industry is a leader in the recreational boat market, it has not constructed small

Continue reading...


Intelligent Wife

To the editor: Your excellent publication has been a benefit to me for many years. Since 9/3/94, however, I am that bane of the writers and publishers — a knowitall. Therefore, I am obliged, by the rules of my cult, to correct you. The largest corporation in the world is not headquartered in Arkansas but

Continue reading...


The Wal-Mart Effect – How the Wold’s Most Powerful Company Really Works and How It’s Transforming the American Economy

Penguin Press, 2006, 304 pages, $25.95 Shopping Ourselves Out of Our Jobs At the recent Island Small Business Forum, I listened to an interesting discussion among three small island business owners about how difficult it is for them to compete against big chains on the mainland. One could argue that there is nothing different in

Continue reading...


The Scottish Islands

Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd., 1998 Hardcover, 518 pages A Clear-Eyed View of Islands Imagine there was a book — a not-too-imposing but thorough book on your favorite group of islands. Imagine that this book belonged to an artist, a geologist, a historian and a sailor before it came to you. And that somewhere along the

Continue reading...