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106th out of 128 books
—
90 voters
The Lobster Chronicles: Life On a Very Small Island
After 17 years at sea, Linda Greenlaw decided it was time to take a break from being a swordboat captain, the career that would earn her a prominent role in Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm and a portrayal in the subsequent film. Greenlaw decided to move back home, to a tiny island seven miles off the Maine coast. There, she would pursue a simpler life as a lobsterman,...more
Paperback, 254 pages
Published
June 11th 2003
by Hyperion
(first published January 1st 2002)
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If I had any guts at all, I would sell all of my sutff, buy a bundle of warm sweaters and move to a tiny island in Maine (although probably not Isle au Haut where the author lives). But, I'm content in Chicago for the moment, where it is cold enough to wear sweaters while I cuddle up under the covers and read my way through Greenlaw's books about fishing/islands in Maine/fishermen.
Hilarious. Linda Greenlaw is an excellent writer. Her non-fiction "The Hungry Ocean" about her days as a swordfish boat captain was gripping drama. But her two non-fiction "humorous" books are 180 degrees the opposite, but just as well written. Very very funny. She describes her quirky island-mates with keen-eyed sarcasm and compassion simultaneously, if that's possible. Laughed out loud through most of the book. See also "All Fishermen Are Liars" for equally humorous observations.
Linda Greenlaw's second book (following her highly-regarded and successful first book, "The Hungry Ocean") follows the author as she gives up sword fishing and returns to her parents' home on the tiny island of Isle au Haut, Maine, intent on becoming a lobster fisherman. She gives quite a bit of insight into the lobstering life of the islanders in the late 1990's, but even more so the nature of "life on a very small island".
I have to admit being more than a little annoyed with the author's whin...more
I have to admit being more than a little annoyed with the author's whin...more
Review published in the New Zealand Herald, 29 March 2003
The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island
Linda Greenlaw
(Schwartz Publishing)
Reviewed by Philippa Jamieson
After seventeen years away on swordfishing boats in the North Atlantic, Linda Greenlaw returns home to a tiny island off the Maine coast. She takes up lobster fishing, like most people on Isle a Haut, and also hopes to find a man, build a house and have children.
The Lobster Chronicles is memoir of a woman at a turning point in...more
The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island
Linda Greenlaw
(Schwartz Publishing)
Reviewed by Philippa Jamieson
After seventeen years away on swordfishing boats in the North Atlantic, Linda Greenlaw returns home to a tiny island off the Maine coast. She takes up lobster fishing, like most people on Isle a Haut, and also hopes to find a man, build a house and have children.
The Lobster Chronicles is memoir of a woman at a turning point in...more
Read this in one slow day as a poll worker for the primary election.
Author Linda Greenlaw is a Maine fishing boat captain. She figured in The Perfect Storm, if you read that or saw the movie. After 17 years of commercial swordfishing, she decided to switch to lobster from her home on the small island Isle au Haut. This is a memoir of one season, with colorful tales of lobster fishing and the various residents of and visitors to the island.
Greenlaw, who has returned to swordfishing and can be se...more
Author Linda Greenlaw is a Maine fishing boat captain. She figured in The Perfect Storm, if you read that or saw the movie. After 17 years of commercial swordfishing, she decided to switch to lobster from her home on the small island Isle au Haut. This is a memoir of one season, with colorful tales of lobster fishing and the various residents of and visitors to the island.
Greenlaw, who has returned to swordfishing and can be se...more
It was fun to read this while I myself am ON a Very Small Island for a few days. On the other side of the country and with no lobster, but still . . .
Linda Greenlaw's books are accessible reads. I was glad there was more swearing in this book than in The Hungry Ocean, not because I think all books need the "F" word, but because The Hungry Ocean seemed overly sanitized without much of it, like she was either a weird puritan or bullshitting her readers.
One of my favorite things about this book and...more
Linda Greenlaw's books are accessible reads. I was glad there was more swearing in this book than in The Hungry Ocean, not because I think all books need the "F" word, but because The Hungry Ocean seemed overly sanitized without much of it, like she was either a weird puritan or bullshitting her readers.
One of my favorite things about this book and...more
I enjoyed the characters introduced by Linda Greenlaw, though I wouldn't want to be one of the ones she satires. Greenlaw has a way of describing events and people in her life so that you feel you are there too...I could really see the people in her town, the things they cared about and fought over in town meetings. I loved the description of her relationship with her parents and how she worked with her father--a great read.
The second book by the author of 'The Hungry Ocean'. 'The Hungry Ocean' was a companion to 'The Perfect Storm'. This book describes life on a very small island in Maine. The author retired from fishing for swordfish on the high seas and moved back to her home which is on Isle au Haut in Maine. She became a lobster fisherman, spending her days setting and retrieving pots. In the off-season she repairs lobster pots and her boat. She describes what it is like to live on a small island. She discusse...more
It used to considered too cruel in parts of New England to serve emprisoned convicts lobster more than once a week. Views have changed since then.
In Greenlaw's second nonfiction (mostly; she says in the introduction that there are a few characters who are composites of more than one actual person, and that some names have been changed) writes about being an (unwillingly) single woman living on the small island where she grew up in Maine, where she traps lobsters for a living. She has reached
...more
In The Lobster Chronicles, Linda Greenlaw takes readers through lobster season on a small island off the coast of Maine. She details the painstakingly repetitive processes entails in lobster fishing, and she shares stories about the island and the people who live there.
At the center of the story are her parents, with whom she lives, and her relationship with them. She describes her relationship with her father through her tales of fishing, as he works for her on her boat, and she details the con...more
At the center of the story are her parents, with whom she lives, and her relationship with them. She describes her relationship with her father through her tales of fishing, as he works for her on her boat, and she details the con...more
Wow. I'm not into sea stories or commercial fishing but I wouldn't have missed this book for the world. Fishermen are a different breed altogether and Linda Greenlaw is a rare and wonderful woman. This book makes me wish I wasn't such a wuss.
Somehow I didn't think this was as good as her first book, "The Hungry Ocean" but I still enjoyed it immensely. I have sailed in her hometown waters and her description of weather and downeast life are "spot on".
I re-read this delightful book nine years after the first reading. I live in a place not unlike an island, isolated by mountains on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. This is a story about an island on the Atlantic Ocean just off the New England coast, but the people and how they interact(and don't) could be about my town.
The issues of a small community with very limited financial opportunities trying to make rational decisions about how to survive now, how they attempt to solve their...more
The issues of a small community with very limited financial opportunities trying to make rational decisions about how to survive now, how they attempt to solve their...more
Much better written than The Hungry Ocean, this book is more memoir than fishing tale--we learn about life on a small island in Maine, get a few glimpses of neighbors, and Greenlaw uses figurative language and dialogue in a more confident manner.
I did find myself wondering about some portraits (why bring up Dotty the postmaster if all you are doing is a two-page character sketch?) and some threads seemed as if they'd come up again but did not (the meetings, for example, could have grounded the...more
I did find myself wondering about some portraits (why bring up Dotty the postmaster if all you are doing is a two-page character sketch?) and some threads seemed as if they'd come up again but did not (the meetings, for example, could have grounded the...more
Read this for some research--and it served its purpose. I learned a lot about the lobster fishing industry from an island richly steeped in its history. The story was ok at times. I appreciate learning about the perspective of this simple lifestyle. I am also newly aware of another culture who appreciates the balance between give and take of humans and their environment. The book paints a great picture of this contrast of care (by the islanders, who must sustain their livelihoods) and disregard...more
This was a good book. I say that with a bit of surprise in my voice. It is not that I expected it to be a fabulous book... I was intrigued by the cover so I picked it up at the Good Will.
It was much better than I expected and I laughed my way delightedly through it!
The author is a lobsterwoman on a tiny island in Maine. The book is filled with anecdotes about her life, her family and the lives of the others on the tiny island.
Not a fantastic-I'll-keep-forever-and-reread-every-year kind of book.....more
It was much better than I expected and I laughed my way delightedly through it!
The author is a lobsterwoman on a tiny island in Maine. The book is filled with anecdotes about her life, her family and the lives of the others on the tiny island.
Not a fantastic-I'll-keep-forever-and-reread-every-year kind of book.....more
I first met sword boat captain Linda Greenlaw in the late ’90s, when Sebastian Junger introduced her to the world on page 36 of The Perfect Storm:
The only other sword boat in the harbor that might be able to outfish [the Andrea Gail] is the Hannah Boden, skippered by a Colby College graduate named Linda Greenlaw. Not only is Greenlaw one of the only women in the business, she’s one of the best captains, period, on the entire East Coast. Year after year, trip after trip, she makes more money tha...more
Oct 03, 2012
Kellie
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
2012-reads,
non-fiction
After seeing the movie, The Perfect Storm, I was enamored with the character Linda Greenlaw and wanted to learn more about her. So I read her first book, The Hungry Ocean. This is about her life on her boat fishing for swordfish and it was enjoyable. Later on in life. She decides to go home to the island where she was born, and fish for lobster with her Dad. This was more like a book of essays. Essays about things that happen in her life during this time on the island. The problem with this is,...more
I read this book because I was in Maine on vacation (first time - loved it) and had run through all my library books. This was on the owner's shelves and I'm glad I read it. It was the perfect place to read it as we were vacationing very near by to this island. An interesting book although there was another one on the shelf that I thought was a little better. But she writes well and I enjoyed learning more about the lobster industry.
Since I'm too lazy to actually be a lobster fisherman, but love lobster, it was fun to have Linda Greenlaw read her book to me. She lives on a small rock off the coast of Maine with a few other people and even a town meeting sounds interesting when you know the people. She kinda got tired by the end and threw in a few stories that seemed a little out of place but I look forward to checking out her cookbook and her new mystery.
It wasn't as much about lobster fishing as I thought it would be (or as the cover and publicity would lead you to believe), but I enjoyed it. I wish I yearned for that kind of life - hard, physical work, small place, few friends. I'm impressed that she can want most of the same things I want but continue to feel hopeful about her inability to find them, whereas I just feel despair. She's certainly inspirational.
After seventeen years at sea, being a swordboat captain, the career that would later earn her a prominent role in Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, she felt it was time to take a break and return home - to a tiny Island seven miles off the Maine coast with a population of 70 year-round residents, 30 of whom are her relatives. She would pursue a simpler life; move back in with her parents and become a professional lobsterman.
I really liked Greenlaw's style of detailing just enough of an incid...more
I really liked Greenlaw's style of detailing just enough of an incid...more
First 2 chapters are mildly interesting, then it's downhill from there. Very little happens, and while Greenlaw is an adequate writer, it takes a fantastic writer to make something out of nothing. Two parts caught my attention: One, the author mentions she likes the sound the lobsters make with their claws when in her boat. She says it's like applause. The lobsters have been captured at this point, their claws are banded so they can't use them, and all they can do is wriggle and rap on the crate...more
I had started the book on a trip to Maine, but didn't finish it until I visited there again the next year. For some reason I just enjoy reading her books more when I'm in Maine! In this case, I was just a few miles from the "small island" in the subtitle of the book, although I never did get a chance to visit it (but I could see it from a distance).
I would never have chosen this book, but it was given to me during our vacation at Cape Cod and so since we were in the midst of lobster feasting, I read it. Interesting facts learned. If you saw the movie, "A Perfect Storm" with George Clooney....the female captain is the author of this book. She was friends with those that perished on the Andrea Gail.
I enjoyed reading about life on a small island. There was just enough technical lobster details so that it didn't overwhelm, but I would have enjoyed more stories about the islanders. I suppose you can only write so much about your forty neighbors before they throw you off the island though. A nice read, interesting anecdotal.
We met and heard Linda Greenlaw at an author's event on Islesboro this summer. I instantly liked her and picked up this book, deciding to read about Isle au Haut before delving into her deep sea adventures.
It did not disappoint. A great glimpse into Maine Island life told through the eyes of a strong and independent woman.
It did not disappoint. A great glimpse into Maine Island life told through the eyes of a strong and independent woman.
Don't let the fact that her main occupation is catching ugly orange bug eyed sea cockroaches deter you from reading any of her books.
After just a month of MDI locals raving about Linda Greenlaw's books I finally decided to pick up one and couldn't put it down. You can ask the people of Maine all the questions you can (while frustrating them) or just read anyone of her 3 books and gain more insight than you ever could have.
After just a month of MDI locals raving about Linda Greenlaw's books I finally decided to pick up one and couldn't put it down. You can ask the people of Maine all the questions you can (while frustrating them) or just read anyone of her 3 books and gain more insight than you ever could have.
I was disappointed in this book; I found it oddly disjointed, with no real thread to hang on to. Some new information on lobstering, and some familiar (to me) observations of life in Maine. I expected a different book, I think. She is on the mark about small town life, though, with its good and bad sides.
I first learned of Linda Greenlaw from The Perfect Storm as she was part of that fishing community, then read her book about swordfishing which was great. This book focuses on her life after leaving swordfishing to start lobstering, moving back with her parents and working beside her father. A lot of the story is around the incredibly small community where they live. It was entertaining but I was hoping for many more stories of her fishing experiences.
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Linda Greenlaws three bestselling books about life as a commercial fisherman -- THE HUNGRY OCEAN (1999), THE LOBSTER CHRONICLES (2002) and ALL FISHERMEN ARE LIARS (2004) -- have climbed as high as #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. She is the winner of the U.S. Maritime Literature Award in 2003, and the New England Book Award for nonfiction in 2004. Time Magazine called her 2005 RECIPES FRO...more
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Jan 14, 2008 11:28am