The Vanishing Coast

This is fine book, written in beautiful, lucid prose, full of stunning B & W photographs. Featured are off-the-beaten-path places like the teeny-tiny post office in Salvo on the Outer Banks and the grave of the famous, eccentric Fort Fisher hermit who once mesmerized visitors to his home in a WW II bunker near Carolina beach. The author, a native of Charleston and a veteran columnist for the Charlotte Observer, has interviewed natives of the last unchanged and rapidly changing places along the Carolina coast. Most of the islands and coastal towns (from Hilton Head to small Outer Banks towns to Charleston) along the coasts of the Carolinas are represented. The author interviewed and photographed: descendants of slaves who still make sweetgrass baskets in the old tradition; the last of the old-time clam rakers, crab pickers, and boat builders who discuss what new ways have done to their livelihoods, the "Live-Aboards", folks who left their nine-to-five lives to live on modest boats along the water's edge; the Menhaden Chanteymen,a group of singing black fisherman who were once an institution in the days "when boats were made of wood, and men of steel"; the "Hoi Toiders" of the Outer Banks who still speak with the same accent as their seventeenth century British ancestors. A great browsing and coffee-table book, would make an excellent gift for anyone who has a home on the coast or wants to visit. For anyone who wants a glimpse of the way things were along the vanishing southern coast, or to see what remains with new eyes.