Geoffrey Wolff has spent thirty summers in Maine, sailing its coastal waters, and here he presents a vivid sampling of its depths. In Chapter One, "Out of the Fog," he tells a harrowing tale of being lost offshore with his family in thick fog without navigation aids. The trip ends with landfall at Mantinicus Island, way off course; the fog lifts and reveals, abruptly within feet, the rocky coast, "looking like thunderclouds but actually the shrouded peaks of spruce trees atop a cliff." This chapter is about the physics and metaphysics of fog-and the pure terror-and about being lost and losing oneself, says Wolff. Chapter Two, "The Ragged Coast," details its geological history and discovery by Europeans, exploring, fishing, settling, trapping, and lumbering. The "comic-operatically tangled early territorial history of places like Castine, where contradictory plaques commemorate the exploits of the French, English, colonial Americans in battles so pipsqueak in their causes and monumental in their outcomes." Chapter Three, "Natives and Rusticators," appreciates the peculiarities of Mainers. Their speech, the social standing among fellow colonists and later among the summer people who invaded their waterfronts and studied their mores. Wolff says he comes to this chapter as a novelist of manners, respectful. In Chapter Four, "Bath and the Kennebec." Wolff describes Bath, his summer home and the greatest shipbuilding port in the world during the great age of sail in the late 18th and 19th centuries. It combines history (and present) fishing, lumbering, shipbuilding, civic decline and renaissance, adaptation. Chapter Five, "Lobsters," is a "rich story of custom, taste, commerce, environmental conflict, and scientific mystery," says Wolff. "The lobster culture's sociology and economics, together with environmental tensions, make this chapter central to the story of the coast." "Boats" is Chapter Six, the extraordinary back-from-the-brink rescue of Maine's most exceptional art and craft. Wolff writes about the boats built in Bath and by myriad boutique yacht builders all along the coast. The final chapter, "Cruising," takes us down the coast, threading the islands, and ending where the book began-in fog. Read Less