Bay Country

By Tom Horton

Book Overview

Originally published in hardback, this book about the Chesapeake is now available in paperback from Johns Hopkins. The author, Tom Horton, is a native of Maryland's Eastern Shore, and has written about the environment for the past 15 years in the Baltimore Sun. His stories of oysters and sea nettle, elms and rivers, barrier islands and blue crabs, farmers and watermen, always reach beyond the local to the most universal of subjects.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080184875X
• ISBN13: 9780801848759
• Release Date: February 1994
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Loving, rounded, view of a complex ecological issue

"Bay Country" does justice to the many legitimate claims on the Chesapeake Bay. Horton loves the bay, its grasses, oysters, crabs, and rockfish; the watermen who live off it and exploit it, and the ways of life and physical artifacts -- bridges, old roads, cabins -- people have built around it. He also knows its lovers, including him, are killing it. He portrays the bay and its life, its tributaries(including a wonderful essey on how hard it is to wring every last pollutant from sewer water) the watermen, their traditional (and tight) communities, and the hard life they make from its resources. He has chapters on wind and energy use by people and animals. Horton poetically evokes the bay's charms, in a book that is part nature writing, part sociology, part ecological economy, and part a gloss on Pogo's famous remark, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Not a particularly hopeful book, but a very realistic one, fair to all sides and to the glorious bay itself.