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The Coast: A Journey Down the Atlantic Shore
The author's detailed account of his walking tour of the Atlantic coast captures the beauty of the region but also reveals that more than ninety percent of the shoreline is privately owned and that pollution and development have taken a heavy toll.
- GenresHistoryNonfictionTravel
233 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1993
2 people are currently reading
22 people want to read
About the author
Joseph J. Thorndike Jr.
52 books2 followersFor the Tax historian, see
Joseph J. Thorndike
Joseph Jacobs Thorndike (July 29, 1913 – November 22, 2005) was an American editor and writer. He was Managing Editor of Life for three years in the late 1940s, and a co-founder of American Heritage and Horizon magazines.
Thorndike was born and raised in Peabody, Massachusetts, a small town north of Boston. His father was a stockbroker, his mother a teacher. Thorndike was a straight A student at Peabody High, valedictorian of his class, and a writer for two school magazines.
At Harvard ('34) he majored in Economics, but spent much of his time at The Harvard Crimson, rising to Managing Editor his junior year, and to President his senior year.
In June 1934, he started work at Time magazine, writing People, Miscellany and Education articles. He was asked by Henry Luce to join a group planning a new picture magazine, and when Life debuted in 1936, Thorndike, though only 23, was an associate editor of the magazine.. His immediate boss at Life was John Shaw Billings, the first Managing Editor. Billings kept a diary in which, according to Loudon Wainwright's book The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of Life, he called Thorndike "a mulish young Yankee," and "a stubborn little New England cuss" Wainwright himself called Thorndike "a handsome, bright, reserved, efficient fellow...ambitious, proud, marked from the start for bigger things."
In 1946, as Life's circulation topped five million, Thorndike became the magazine's third Managing Editor, a position he held for three years. Toward the end of his stay, disagreements grew between him and Luce. Life, in late 1948, had published a "Life Goes To A Party" story about an uninhibited dance party in Hawaii, including photos of scantily-dressed partygoers. Luce's reaction was to subject the Managing Editor to more supervision, which Thorndike resisted. The dispute came to a head in August, 1949, after Luce circulated a memoir proposing an "Editor-in-Chief's Committee" that would decide on all future articles for the magazine. Thorndike read it, packed his briefcase and resigned.
In 1950, Thorndike and another refugee from Life, Oliver Jensen, formed a small publishing company, Picture Press. They put out a book of cowboy photos by Life photographer Leonard McCombe, and a lavish picture book for Ford Motor Company, Ford at Fifty. James Parton, whom Thorndike had known at the Crimson, joined them in 1952 to create Thorndike Jensen & Parton, and in 1954 they took over a small history publication named American Heritage. They enlarged it, turned it into a hardcover, profusely illustrated bimonthly with no advertisements, and hired popular American Civil War historian Bruce Catton as editor and writer.
Circulation at American Heritage rose to over 300,000. David McCullough, author of the bestsellers Truman and John Adams, and writer and editor for the magazine, later said that it was "the best place I ever worked as an employee... They were receptive to new ideas, with very high editorial standards, high accuracy, and quality writing... You felt like you were cast in a hit show with great people."
A second magazine, Horizon, followed in 1958, and over the next three decades the company published dozens of illustrated books on history, art and architecture. Thorndike wrote two of them: The Magnificent Builders And Their Dream Houses (1978), and The Very Rich: A History of Wealth (1985).
American Heritage sold to McGraw-Hill in 1970, to private investor Samuel Pryor Reed of New York City in 1976, to Forbes in 1986, and to an independent publisher, Edwin S. Grosvenor, in 2007.
In his early seventies, Thorndike served for two years as head of The American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, a group of writers and scholars who are polled on acceptable English usage.
In 1993 Thorndike published his last book, The Coast: A Journey Down the Atlantic Shore, which Kirkus Reviews described as "an effect
Joseph Jacobs Thorndike (July 29, 1913 – November 22, 2005) was an American editor and writer. He was Managing Editor of Life for three years in the late 1940s, and a co-founder of American Heritage and Horizon magazines.
Thorndike was born and raised in Peabody, Massachusetts, a small town north of Boston. His father was a stockbroker, his mother a teacher. Thorndike was a straight A student at Peabody High, valedictorian of his class, and a writer for two school magazines.
At Harvard ('34) he majored in Economics, but spent much of his time at The Harvard Crimson, rising to Managing Editor his junior year, and to President his senior year.
In June 1934, he started work at Time magazine, writing People, Miscellany and Education articles. He was asked by Henry Luce to join a group planning a new picture magazine, and when Life debuted in 1936, Thorndike, though only 23, was an associate editor of the magazine.. His immediate boss at Life was John Shaw Billings, the first Managing Editor. Billings kept a diary in which, according to Loudon Wainwright's book The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of Life, he called Thorndike "a mulish young Yankee," and "a stubborn little New England cuss" Wainwright himself called Thorndike "a handsome, bright, reserved, efficient fellow...ambitious, proud, marked from the start for bigger things."
In 1946, as Life's circulation topped five million, Thorndike became the magazine's third Managing Editor, a position he held for three years. Toward the end of his stay, disagreements grew between him and Luce. Life, in late 1948, had published a "Life Goes To A Party" story about an uninhibited dance party in Hawaii, including photos of scantily-dressed partygoers. Luce's reaction was to subject the Managing Editor to more supervision, which Thorndike resisted. The dispute came to a head in August, 1949, after Luce circulated a memoir proposing an "Editor-in-Chief's Committee" that would decide on all future articles for the magazine. Thorndike read it, packed his briefcase and resigned.
In 1950, Thorndike and another refugee from Life, Oliver Jensen, formed a small publishing company, Picture Press. They put out a book of cowboy photos by Life photographer Leonard McCombe, and a lavish picture book for Ford Motor Company, Ford at Fifty. James Parton, whom Thorndike had known at the Crimson, joined them in 1952 to create Thorndike Jensen & Parton, and in 1954 they took over a small history publication named American Heritage. They enlarged it, turned it into a hardcover, profusely illustrated bimonthly with no advertisements, and hired popular American Civil War historian Bruce Catton as editor and writer.
Circulation at American Heritage rose to over 300,000. David McCullough, author of the bestsellers Truman and John Adams, and writer and editor for the magazine, later said that it was "the best place I ever worked as an employee... They were receptive to new ideas, with very high editorial standards, high accuracy, and quality writing... You felt like you were cast in a hit show with great people."
A second magazine, Horizon, followed in 1958, and over the next three decades the company published dozens of illustrated books on history, art and architecture. Thorndike wrote two of them: The Magnificent Builders And Their Dream Houses (1978), and The Very Rich: A History of Wealth (1985).
American Heritage sold to McGraw-Hill in 1970, to private investor Samuel Pryor Reed of New York City in 1976, to Forbes in 1986, and to an independent publisher, Edwin S. Grosvenor, in 2007.
In his early seventies, Thorndike served for two years as head of The American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, a group of writers and scholars who are polled on acceptable English usage.
In 1993 Thorndike published his last book, The Coast: A Journey Down the Atlantic Shore, which Kirkus Reviews described as "an effect
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 28, 2012
Here is a travelogue, a trip along the Atlantic coast of the US, from Quoddy Head Light at the northern end of Maine to the southernmost point of Key West. It visits most of the seashore in between, and though it appears like a continuous voyage, in fact the book was stitched together from many separate trips, each contributing one or more chapters. Those chapters can be read individually too, making it a good choice for a leisurely, stop-and-go reader.
The story flows easily and pleasantly--as may be expected from a co-founder of the "American heritage" magazine--picking up interesting locations and tidbits of history. Thoreau's walk around Cape Cod is retraced, for instance, and his observations are compared to what one finds today. Much space is also devoted to wildlife and fishing--telling us (among other things) that the little sandpipers running around Florida's beaches may well be the same as are seen (at a different season) at Cape Cod, one stop on their annual migration, which continues far, far north.
One observation runs through the entire book--evident at almost all the locations visited--that the US seashore is overloaded by the exploding population in its immediate vicinity. During the past century, much of the shoreline has become fenced-off private property, and fishing has depleted the ocean and reduced its productivity. In Maine there was a time when well-off students brought to school sandwiches with meat loaf, while "the poorer children ate lobster." Not any more. The National Park Service gets high marks for its efforts to save the shore, undermanned and underfunded as it is. But the task is too big.
Furthermore, the ocean lapping at the sands refuses to be subdued. Cape Cod is being chewed away at about 3 feet per year: it is actually a relic, deposited by the glacier of the last ice age, as is Long Island. Some day Cape Cod will disappear altogether--not soon, for sure, but meanwhile its sands are constantly shifting, and over the years peninsulas become islands and small islands disappear. Stone seawalls may protect properties behind them (for a while, at least), but they hasten the departure of sand from their ocean side. Stone "groins" extending into the water may perhaps collect sand (at least on the side facing the off-shore current)--or they may not, but if they do, it is often at the expense of neighboring beaches.
The many people who have overloaded the shore have also endowed it with a rich heritage of stories, many of which can be found here. The story of King Phillip's war, in which the Indians of Rhode Island were wiped out by early British settlers--an act of genocide now commemorated only by a small monument, giving the view of the perpetrators. You read of the colony planted in 1587 on Roanoke Islands, at the Outer Banks, a colony which soon vanished. Also of the life of plantation slaves on the sea islands off Georgia, documented by a young English lady who found more than she had expected. There is the story of Spanish treasure ships sunk off Florida, and of the railroad built by an enterprising developer across the Florida Keys, all the way to Key West. It served faithfully from 1912 until the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, which wiped out great parts of it. And much, much more, about the decline of the Chesapeake, about the great rivers of Florida and about Cape Canaveral, now a first-rate refuge for wildlife. Thank God for space rockets!
As books go, this one is old, and much may have changed. It was published in 1993, when rising global seal levels were not yet a visible public concern, though the process was well underway. The seashore remains a nice place to visit, though I would think twice before building a home next to it, and probably could not afford such a site, anyway. But if I do, I promise to keep the beach open to casual visitors, as a common heritage. As the book tells, that was already demanded by ancient Roman law.
The story flows easily and pleasantly--as may be expected from a co-founder of the "American heritage" magazine--picking up interesting locations and tidbits of history. Thoreau's walk around Cape Cod is retraced, for instance, and his observations are compared to what one finds today. Much space is also devoted to wildlife and fishing--telling us (among other things) that the little sandpipers running around Florida's beaches may well be the same as are seen (at a different season) at Cape Cod, one stop on their annual migration, which continues far, far north.
One observation runs through the entire book--evident at almost all the locations visited--that the US seashore is overloaded by the exploding population in its immediate vicinity. During the past century, much of the shoreline has become fenced-off private property, and fishing has depleted the ocean and reduced its productivity. In Maine there was a time when well-off students brought to school sandwiches with meat loaf, while "the poorer children ate lobster." Not any more. The National Park Service gets high marks for its efforts to save the shore, undermanned and underfunded as it is. But the task is too big.
Furthermore, the ocean lapping at the sands refuses to be subdued. Cape Cod is being chewed away at about 3 feet per year: it is actually a relic, deposited by the glacier of the last ice age, as is Long Island. Some day Cape Cod will disappear altogether--not soon, for sure, but meanwhile its sands are constantly shifting, and over the years peninsulas become islands and small islands disappear. Stone seawalls may protect properties behind them (for a while, at least), but they hasten the departure of sand from their ocean side. Stone "groins" extending into the water may perhaps collect sand (at least on the side facing the off-shore current)--or they may not, but if they do, it is often at the expense of neighboring beaches.
The many people who have overloaded the shore have also endowed it with a rich heritage of stories, many of which can be found here. The story of King Phillip's war, in which the Indians of Rhode Island were wiped out by early British settlers--an act of genocide now commemorated only by a small monument, giving the view of the perpetrators. You read of the colony planted in 1587 on Roanoke Islands, at the Outer Banks, a colony which soon vanished. Also of the life of plantation slaves on the sea islands off Georgia, documented by a young English lady who found more than she had expected. There is the story of Spanish treasure ships sunk off Florida, and of the railroad built by an enterprising developer across the Florida Keys, all the way to Key West. It served faithfully from 1912 until the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, which wiped out great parts of it. And much, much more, about the decline of the Chesapeake, about the great rivers of Florida and about Cape Canaveral, now a first-rate refuge for wildlife. Thank God for space rockets!
As books go, this one is old, and much may have changed. It was published in 1993, when rising global seal levels were not yet a visible public concern, though the process was well underway. The seashore remains a nice place to visit, though I would think twice before building a home next to it, and probably could not afford such a site, anyway. But if I do, I promise to keep the beach open to casual visitors, as a common heritage. As the book tells, that was already demanded by ancient Roman law.
July 6, 2014
From Quoddy Head to the tip of the Florida Keys; the subtitle says what you need to know. The journey is a composite of several trips over the years, but a point of view unites the narrative. The author's basic question is how we can preserve what needs saving about the coast in the legal and historic context of market reality. There's a lot to be pessimistic about, but Thorndike likes to point out what has helped the situation and what gives encouragement. My own observations run closely parallel to his, but I won't give you a spoiler about his surprising conclusion. Considering his career it's no surprise that he writes well and clearly. I stayed interested for the whole journey and would have rated the book higher if it weren't reflecting the situation a full score of years ago. If the coast and smell of salt water makes you long for home, you might find this a good read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews