黑洞社区 Book Club

November 2022  |  Chesapeake Requiem

Wednesday, November 30, 2022
12:00pm ET


november book cover image  

Please join the 黑洞社区 Online Book Club for a discussion of Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island by Earl Swift. Chesapeake Requiem is a brilliant, soulful, and timely portrait of a two-hundred-year-old crabbing community in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay as it faces extinction.

Students, Faculty, Staff, and Alumni are all welcome!

Borrow the book/ebook from a Delaware library or through your local library! 


ABOUT THE BOOK

Tangier Island, Virginia, is a community unique on the American landscape. Mapped by John Smith in 1608, settled during the American Revolution, the tiny sliver of mud is home to 470 hardy people who live an isolated and challenging existence, with one foot in the 21st century and another in times long passed. They are separated from their countrymen by the nation’s largest estuary, and a twelve-mile boat trip across often tempestuous water—the same water that for generations has made Tangier’s fleet of small fishing boats a chief source for the rightly prized Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and has lent the island its claim to fame as the softshell crab capital of the world.

Yet for all of its long history, and despite its tenacity, Tangier is disappearing. The very water that has long sustained it is erasing the island day by day, wave by wave. It has lost two-thirds of its land since 1850, and still its shoreline retreats by fifteen feet a year—meaning this storied place will likely succumb first among U.S. towns to the effects of climate change.

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