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BOOKS 1806 Laurel Crest Madison, Wisconsin 53705-1065 (608) 238-SAIL FAX (608) 23 8-7249 Email: tuttlemaritime@charter.net http://tuttlemaritime.com Books about the Sea, Ship & Sailor Catalogue Upon Request 62
with Crean's story, and he relays it in an engaging way, with solid writing but not overly dram atic-ways you could describe Tom C rean him self. Tom Crean was a m odest working m an . H e didn't write books or go on speaking tours when he returned from these incredible voyages, which is why we do not know his personal story. W hen the Sh ackleton crew m ade it back to England, C rean resumed his naval service before retiring from the Royal Navy. W hen he eventually retired fro m the sea, he quietly went back to his hometown in C ounty Kerry, m arried his hometown sweetheart, and opened a sm all public house called The South Pole Inn. Hirzel's book fi lls in a big gap in the stories of the H eroic Age of Exploration and reminds us that the people we remember-Shackleton , Scott, Peary, Amundsen, and others-did not pursue these aims alone. H old Fast is a no-frills publication. There are no illustrations or maps, and Hirzel is clearly a big fan of the subject he writes about. But, he is a good storyteller and C rean's is a story worth reading. M ICHAEL R UGGE RIO
Elmont, N ew York
Storms & Sand: A Story of Shipwrecks and the Big Sable Point Coast Guard Station by Steve, Grace and Joel Truman (Pine W oods Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 201 2 , 208pp, illus, appen, notes, index, ISBN 978-0-9846-369-4; $29.95hc) Life-Saving Service historians tend to talk in big numbers: 186,000 lives saved between 1878 and 1915 from more than 275 stations on the East, W est and G ulf coasts, on the O hio River, and all along the shores of the Great Lakes. But the fact to keep in mind is that life-saving was a local phenom enon. Those 275 stations each had to be rnmewhere speci fic, a location known for its bars, shoals, and underwater ledges . They were places where ships had foundered for yea rs, where even lighthouses had not been enough to keep m ariners away from danger. The stations we re often named fo r the most prominent geographic features near them : points, lakes, rivers, coves. A nd so we zoom in . Of the 275 stations, fo rty-fi ve were in Michigan; of those, about a third were on Lake
M ichigan . From 1876 to 1937, the LifeSaving Service and its successor service, the United States Coas t G uard, operated a sm all-boat rescue station at Big Sable Point. The Truma n family, which has been active in Coast G uard history preservation fo r yea rs, tackled the story of the Big Sable Point station in the most basic, thorough way possible. Steve, Grace, and Joel Truman read the story of the station through the eyes of those who lived it, through the d aily logs and wreck reports written by the keepers, surfmen, and, later, warrant officers. The result is a blow-by-blow n arrative (with some of those blows being nor'easters) of the station's history, featuring the storms and the shipwrecks but reminding us all that in between big weather and incidents of high drama was the mundane nature of the life of a surfman when times were slow, as they usually were. W ith the similarity of routine shared by all the stations, some of the story is the standard fare of Life-Saving Service history, but it is the individuality of the shipwrecks, the situations, and the people that create the differences that make each station worth examining in depth. One surfm an at Big Sable Point, for instance, claimed that the reason he didn't make his 3:30AM m a rk on his patrol clock one night was because he was "leaning his elbows on the windowsill, looking out the window and fa inted ." Thirty-six years after the its construction, the governm ent was informed that the station had been built on the wrong land, initiating an eight-year p rocess of trying to correct the situation w ith the actual owner. Such stories only happened at Big Sable Point. Followers of the history of the LifeSaving Service h ave long yearned for the whole picture, the grand story of the service written in 275 pieces. Each station deserves its own book; the Trumans prove that thought with Big Sable Point. Their book is now the template for what each local town that hosted a Life-Saving Service station sho uld be striving fo r- a thorough retelling a nd reinterpretation of the heroic deeds of a class of m en and wom en who have otherwise been buried by the sands of time. } OHN GALLUZZO
Hull, M assachusetts
SEA HISTORW 145, WINTER 2013- 14