Maryland's Vanishing Lives

By John Sherwwood, John Sherwood, John Sherwwood, et al.

Book Overview

For more than two years, John Sherwood roamed Maryland's small towns and city neighborhoods, traveled Appalachian back roads, and sailed the Chesapeake looking for people whose work or way of life recalled the state's rich and varied tradition. Maryland's Vanishing Lives is his vivid account of the people he met on those journeys. Working in a country store or an old-time movie house, on a small tobacco farm or a weathered skipjack, Sherwood's subjects interest us as people, as stubborn survivors who have watched--sometimes defiantly, sometimes wistfully--as the world moved on.

These Marylanders' stories poignantly show what happens to family businesses and ordinary folk in the face of new technology, suburban sprawl, franchise outlets, and changing tastes. But Maryland's Vanishing Lives is also an engaging celebration of pride and craft, and the ability to survive. In this collection of sixty-six short profiles, illustrated with memorable photographs by Edwin Remsberg, Sherwood preserves for posterity the lives of Marylanders who hang on to values and skills that are quickly disappearing.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801852498
• ISBN13: 9780801852497
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.5" x 10.5"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Poignant Portraits in a Homogenous Age

As franchises, strip malls,highways, fast food and outlets become more prevelant in America, it is refreshing and enlightening to read John Sherwood's, "Maryland's Vanishing Lives." His colorful and poignant portraits of ways of life in Maryland (a one-room schoolhouse;Tool bridge operator etc.) are a reminder of how things have been, but are quickly giving way to the mass marketing approach in our nation. Sherwood preserves the varied ways of life that are quickly going by the wayside in our impersonal age, and does so with an exquisite human touch. Bravo!