Product Description

This lively book reveals a little known culture that predates the Pilgrims and has remained true to the earliest version of the American Dream: an egalitarian, self-reliant republic. The self-sufficient lobstermen of the Maine coast are models of environmental prudence: at a time when the fishing industry is in crisis, they have conserved the bounty of their waters, even as the once-humble lobster has become a coveted delicacy. How denizens of the coast achieved this balance, even as they withstood assaults from everyone from French raiders to rapacious land speculators, makes for a "stellar informal history ... a primer for conservation and the effects of bad politics" (The Kingston Observer).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #119049 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this lucid cultural history of Maine, journalist Woodard tells the story of the rugged people who inhabit the state's coastal fishing communities, beginning with the Scotch-Irish, Germans and migrants from southern New England who from the early 17th to the early 19th centuries struggled to make a living in an inhospitable environment while trying to fend off Indians, religious zealots, wealthy Bostonian land grabbers and "rusticators" (vacationers who spawned unwanted development). Maine's economy prospered for a while after it seceded from Massachusetts and became a state in 1820, but between 1860 and 1900 everything collapsed except for lobstering, which the fishermen managed to protect with effective conservation practices. Lobsters became, and remain, the basis of the state's fishing industry. The author was born and raised in Maine, and well understands the pride, independence and ability to work together for the good of the community-(traditions derived from the early settlers, he says), which helped the fishermen preserve a resource that is essential to their livelihood. But, he points out, other factors are now at play, for the state is being overrun by suburbanites who don't understand or respect this tradition. Woodard tries to maintain hope that the old spirit of independence will save the state's distinctive character, but he can't help ending on a discouraging note, wondering whether Maine will soon be just one more suburb in the great East Coast megalopolis. Woodard (Ocean's End) covers a lot of ground in his informative book, and he never fails to make the story engaging. Maps not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Woodard synthesizes the history and ponders the future of Maine, land of lobsters and L. L. Bean. His text both begins and concludes with Monhegan Island, an interesting place where one of the earliest English colonizers anchored and whose inhabitants today cater to tourists in the summer and to lobstermen in the winter. It's a microcosm of wider themes in Maine history. Woodard ably develops them, showing off the state as a climatically difficult place to prosper that consistently over its history has existed in a quasi-colonial relationship with outside economic interests. Thus, the present-day suburbanization of the coast succeeds earlier forms of influence emanating from Massachusetts, such as the land-grasping magnates of the late 1700s known as the "Great Proprietors" or the city-escaping pioneers of vacationing of the mid-1800s. The author of Ocean's End (2000), a report on environmental degradation, Woodard also delivers hands-on details about the practice and culture of lobstering, a thriving exception to the collapse of the Gulf of Maine fishery. A fond but concerned portrait of the author's native state. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
A beautifully considered history…Woodard’s admiration for lobster culture is stirring…[Mainers’] feisty pluck remains undiminished in the face of obstacles. -- Newsday

A feast…Woodard uses the lobster to tell the whole history of Maine. -- Working Waterfront

A triumph -- Bookpage

Delves deeply and reflectively into the history of the coast of Maine and its people. -- The Boston Globe

Highly engaging, intelligent -- Down East

Lively -- The Economist

Lucid…engaging -- Publishers Weekly

Thought-provoking…Woodard is a talented writer, a skilled journalist….lively reading for history buffs…an important book for any Maine lover’s bookshelf. -- Bangor Daily News

Woodard doesn’t disguise his pique. Maine is worth fighting for-as is any village with distinctly etched local character and community. -- The Christian Science Monitor

[A] well-researched and well-written cultural and ecological history of stubborn perseverance. -- USA Today

Customer Reviews

The sky is falling, but not on lobsters
The sky is truly falling on many fish species. Nets come up empty, and fish-based economies collapse. But the Maine lobster seems almost immune to such disaster; a growing number of Maine lobstermen continue to haul in a grand 20 million pounds a year of delectable crustacean with no shortage looming on the horizon. Why?

The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier by Colin Woodard explains how Maine lobstermen voluntarily conserve their lobster population and keep the industry sustainable.

The stereotype of the Maine fisherman as stoic, independent and not easily impressed is apparently well deserved. Woodard suggests that Maine's lobsters benefit from small, traditional, often ancient, fishing communities that jealously guard their resource. Though anyone can theoretically obtain a license to fish for lobster in Maine, the pros protect their harbors from interlopers, snubbing neophytes with no ancestral ties to the community, and even vandalizing their traps.

Maine lobstermen have also protected their lobster population by making the breeding female lobster almost sacred. Woodard lauds the lobstermen's practice of "V-notching" egg-bearing females-punching a small hole in their tail fins before releasing them back into the ocean. Notching is code for "Cherished breeder-not for sale." Lobstermen have agreed among themselves to throw back the V-notched lobsters-even when they are eggless.

Maine's lobstering community also tosses back outsized male lobsters-a practice unique among fishing industries.

Woodard writes ambitiously about the whole state of Maine and its history, starting with its pre-Pilgrim inhabitation by Europeans. Throughout his book, he keeps an eye on lobstering, the industry that has been the backbone of Maine's economy, the ever-present default option as other industries, such as ice and granite, failed.

Woodard reports not only on the conflict between lobstermen and government scientists, but also on the friction between ancient lobster communities and encroaching suburbia-what he calls the "Massification" of southern Maine, i.e. the tendency of Boston professionals to sprawl northward, driving lobstermen out of their ancestral homes with tax increases, beach access restrictions and noise ordinances.

Woodard's chapter, "The Triumph of the Commons," is, itself, a triumph. Science has declared that, by and large, shared natural resources are doomed to overharvesting, but Woodard shows how Maine's lobster community has defied that trend through religious self-regulation.

Woodard takes as his focal point the beautiful and largely undeveloped Monhegan Island. On Monhegan, lobstermen have taken resource conservation a quantum step further: they only fish for lobsters December through June.

Monhegan is not only a model of conservation; for Woodard, it is also a symbol of Maine and lobstering culture at its very best. Monhegan, he writes, is "an ancient, self-governing village, essentially classless and car-less, whose homes, sheds, and footpaths appear to have thrust themselves out of the wild and arrestingly beautiful landscape. . . . [B]eing immersed in it pulls at something deep within our civic being, a hint of a simpler, perhaps nobler world that might have been, but can never be again."

Absolutely fascinating and extremely well written book
Despite having grown up in midcoast Maine, the focus of this book, and having had Maine history in school, I learned so much from this book! I had no idea how fascinating the history of coastal Maine was---perhaps because much of it is rather disturbing---not something they wanted to teach us in 6th grade! I also now understand much more about the attitudes I grew up with regarding those "from away". I learned that I was part of a huge migration into Maine in the early 70s---I had always known that most anyone in my class that was not native had moved to Maine the very same summer we did (summer of '72) but I never really realized why. I've been away from Maine for a while now, and this book opened my eyes to some of the recent changes there---how many now are moving to Maine that have no interest in really becoming part of the culture they find there. And of course, I also learned a great deal about lobstering. Growing up, about half the kids in my class had fathers who were lobstermen, but this book greatly increased my knowledge of their culture and of lobsters themselves. I can't recommend this book highly enough!!

Maine History
This book is a page turner I couldn't put down. Beautifully written, it does a thorough job of concisely telling the history of coastal Maine and, by so doing, gives us a start on the history of New England. It takes us from the earliest settlers to today, and even if one has, as I have, lived on the coast of Maine for close to 40 years, one can learn from the book. Put it together with "Islanders" by Virginia Thorndike, and you have a picture of one of the last best places on earth. Please don't let these books persuade you to move here!