An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in Chesapeake Bay

Notice that all the reviewers here live near the Chesapeake Bay. This bay will interest and speak to all those that have an interest in a society and environment almost gone. A super read, intimate in detail and beautiful in imagery.

Tom Horton's great gift as a writer is his ability to conjure up the natural world in words. His memoir of his family's time on Smith Island is his best work yet. Note I said yet. A book by Tom Horton is always a cause for rejoicing. His environmental writing is up there with Aldo Leopold and Barry Lopez.

Tom Horton's "An Island Out of Time" is more than just a documentary of life on Smith Island, it's a paean to individuality, to spirituality, and to the love of things natural whether they result in environmental disaster or reclamation. The uniqueness of life on a semi-isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay is also a refreshing look at the idea of community - unburdened by political correctness or ultra-sophisticated analysis. Horton waxes poetically about the sun's play over the marshes, or the clarity of the water, the coldness of the waves in a storm, and the gradual decay of the island's ability to survive. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who wants to understand the real impacts of the Chesapeake - or celebrate its uniqueness.

Horton writes an environmental column in the Baltimore Sunwhich Isometimes enjoy and sometimes don't. So I was prepared for Island Out of Time to be average. But I was more than pleasantly surprised. Horton has written a first-rate account of the watermen and their families on Smith Island from the first-hand observations of his family, which lived on the island for several years, as well as great oral accounts from the islanders themselves.