John R. Stilgoe

My rating mainly applies to the first parts of the book since I found them to be the strongest. Basically, this book asks you to look at the hidden world or structure around you. He covers things like all the wiring around us, the postal network, roads and other infrastructure we take for granted. It caused me to pay a lot more attention to things, and see if I could deduce what was going on. (For instance, figuring out which lines were cable and which were phone in my neighborhood.) The only downside to the book was that a lot of the a-ha moments were at the beginning, and the later chapters were a lot less interesting. But still an interesting book.… (more)

This is, both in form and content, an odd little book . . . but a fascinating one. At barely 64 pages, each not much bigger than an index card, it probably contains fewer words than a modest magazine article. Yet, it is (well, my copy is, anyway) beautifully crafted: high quality paper, delicate pen-and-ink illustrations, bound in soft blue cloth, and stamped with silver for the title. There's even a slender, sewn-in bookmark of silver ribbon -- a whimsical touch, since it would be hard not to read the entire thing in one sitting. The content is just as offbeat, but just as satisfying. It pretends to be a guide to the etymology of words unique to the world of New England coastal marshes and the shallow-draft rowboats that ply them . . . and it is that (Stilgoe explains "skiff" and "skeg" and the difference between "shoal" and "spit," not to mention "guzzle" and "gutter"), but it is also more. Stilgoe notices things -- the way a rowboat moves in the tide, the way the waves look when a river meets the sea, the blindness of dictionaries to the nuances of maritime language -- and, in the process of his lessons in etymology, describes them in intriguing ways. Shallow Water Dictionary is also -- last, but far from least -- an elegant introduction to salt marshes for readers who've never seen one, and a delightful trip into the past for readers who (like me) grew up with them.… (more)