![]() Swift goes to Tangier Island and talks with its inhabitants, lives there, gets inside their lives and struggles of the place. “Sixty years later it was the size of a small bedroom. ![]() “Settlers quit Sharps Island, not far to the south, which had stretched across 449 acres before the Civil War and was still big enough to merit a three- story hotel and a steamship pier in the 1890s,” he writes. Quickly and steadily in the modern era, as Swift makes clear, all that has changed. The island itself was once part of a much larger chain of land, a booming string of fishing communities with thriving hotels, busy streets, crowded schools, working post offices, and hard-working families who'd spent over two centuries plying the waters of the bay. Thanks to a savage combination of subduction and sea-level rise, Tangier Island is rapidly disappearing beneath the water. The reason Tangier Island's crabbing industry is dying couldn't be simpler or more stark: it's because Tangier Island itself is dying. ![]() His subject is very specific: the dying crab-fishing industry of Tangier Island, which sits in the middle of the mighty Chesapeake Bay. Journalist Earl Swift spent two years researching his new book, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, and the result is a protracted autopsy of a world that's still technically alive. ![]()
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