Review by Booklist Review
Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay has attracted journalists for decades owing to its genealogy most inhabitants descend from the island's original settlers; its variety of English, which is linguistically traceable to those 1700s settlers; its Methodist religiosity; its oyster and blue-crab fishery; and for Swift, its role as bellwether for rising sea levels. Tangier Island is measurably shrinking and will, absent remediation, disappear by 2100, according to environmental studies. So Swift decided to embed himself in Tangier society from 2016 to 2017, and this work recounts his observations. For starters, he accompanied crabbers on their boats and learned about collecting and marketing fresh crabs. Back on Tangier Island, he attended social gatherings, church services, funerals, and a graduation ceremony and discovered what various individuals think about their island's future. Swift tempers his melancholy over the fact that Tangier and the way of life it supports are in inexorable decline with information about possible ways to stem Tangier's physical erosion with jetties, seawalls, and landfills. An empathetic portrait of a small and unique community and its plight under environmental stress.--Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Swift empathetically examines the complicated history of Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay, which he calls "a community unlike any in America." Swift (The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways) notes Tangier's unique qualities: "Here live people so isolated for so long that they have their own style of speech, a singsong brogue of old words and phrases, twisted vowels, odd rhythms," and the island's centuries-old crabbing industry dictates everyday schedules. Crabbers go out on the bay in the early morning hours, so buyers, crab processing companies, and marine police "synchronize their workdays to the watermen's schedule." When the crabbing industry hits an inevitable rough patch, the consequences can be significant. So can younger generations leaving Tangier and the effects of global climate change and rising sea levels: "Every year sees the Chesapeake soak a little more upland into marsh, and drown a little more marsh into open water," leaving it careening toward being uninhabitable. With understanding and insight, Swift presents a thought-provoking portrait of Tangier Island as it once was, as it is now, and as it could someday become. Agent: David Black, David Black Literary Agency. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Journalist Swift (The Big Roads) documents the nearly two years he spent living on Tangier Island in Virginia's Chesapeake Bay, a unique community that scientists say may be the first place in the United States to cease to exist because of climate change. With less than 1,000 residents and an economy revolving around blue crab fishing, Tangier loses 15 feet of shoreline a year. Island residents have developed their own ways of living, adapting to the isolating environment away from the mainland. Swift's journey through Tangier provides a firsthand account of island living through the words of the islanders themselves, sprinkled with historical anecdotes and scientific observations. He shares a close portrait of the people that make up this threatened land and its one-of-a-kind way of life. VERDICT A moving account of a vanishing place, sure to satisfy anyone concerned with climate change, environmental issues, and -anthropology.-Venessa Hughes, Buffalo, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Land and culture erode on an island in the Chesapeake Bay.Journalist Swift (Auto Biography: A Classic Car, An Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream, 2014, etc.) spent more than a year on Tangier Island, among crab fishermen and their families, in 2000 and again in late fall 2015. In a graceful melding of history, nature writing, and perceptive cultural commentary, the author offers an affectionate portrait of the island and its "God-fearing, self-reliant," close-knit residentsnow numbering under 500. Although Tangier currently faces new social problemsdrugs, alcohol (on an island defiantly dry), and loss of young people to the mainlandthe island "is more Norman Rockwell than real American town, with morals intact, air fresh, and entertainments wholesome." When Swift returned to the island in 2015 from his home in Virginia, he was particularly concerned with how Tangier was dealing with climate change that threatens to raise sea levels. Already, the island has shrunk from 2,163 acres, as documented in 1850, to 789. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicted that about a third of remaining acreage would vanish within the next 50 years without major intervention. Residents, however, ascribe topographical changes "solely to wind-driven waves, not climate change," refusing to believe that accelerating winds were "a symptom of a global phenomenon." Still, they feared for their future as crab fishermen. With hundreds of millions of crabs swimming by the island each year, Tangier supplies restaurants all along the east coast; New York, for example, pays handsomely for soft-shell crabs. Swift's profiles of individuals are sharply drawn and empathetic, and he captures their frustration with government bureaucracy as they hope for federal financing of a sea wall. It will take a miracle, writes the author, for the Army Corps of Engineers and Congress to act "before a storm muscles up the bay and renders the whole thing moot."A well-rendered narrative about how one specific island's fate stands as a warning for all coastal regions. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
