The Coast: A Journey Down the Atlantic Shore by Joseph J. Thorndike
234 pages
Published 1993
Read from March 2 to March 3
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I don't know what I was hoping to find in this book, exactly. I didn't dare hope for ecological eloquence on the scale of Steve Nicholls' Paradise Found, but I did have in mind something of the quixotically domestic adventuring of Roger Deakin's Wildwood and Waterlog. With those examples in mind, I could only be disappointed by Thorndike's tame journalism, which reminded me of nothing so much as a softball profile piece you could find in any issue of National Geographic from the 1960s to the mid-1990s (back when National Geographic put some effort into text-based articles, before it devolved into a monthly picture book for readers with newsstand attention spans), stretched into the size of a small novel. Thorndike's text even follows the pattern of those bygone articles, framing his journey with brisk background description and asides into historical poetry, stopping to get flavor commentary from fishermen, wildlife refuge managers, local conservation leaders, local weekly editors, and the like, without ever examining any particular issue in detail. Add some Sam Abell photographs, and any regional cluster of chapters could be a cover article. I like old National Geographic articles -- I quit my subscription once I divined that the picture-book format was here to stay, a regrettable reality of the new print economy -- but in book form it's merely a pleasant diversion, a quick but not especially memorable read that makes me wish Roger Deakin had written more books.
No comments:
Post a Comment