Dangerous Coast: Pictured Rocks Shipwrecks

by Frederick Stonehouse

OUR COPY HAS THE SAME COVER AS STOCK PHOTO SHOWN. MINOR SCUFFING, DINGS & EDGE WEAR ON COVERS AND SPINE. SMALL BLACKOUT AT BOTTOM OF FIRST PAGE. NO OTHER MARKING OR WRITING NOTED WITHIN BOOK.

248 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1997

About the author

Frederick Stonehouse has authored over thirty books on maritime history, many of them focusing on the Great Lakes and contributed to several others. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and Great Lakes Lighthouse Tales are regional best sellers. Wreck Ashore, the U.S. Life-Saving Service on the Great Lakes, won a national publishing award and is the predominant work on the subject. Another book, Haunted Lakes, Great Lakes Maritime Ghost Stories, Superstitions and Sea Serpents, has opened an entirely new genre in Great Lakes study. His book, Final Voyage, is the first Great Lakes shipwreck book for children.

He has been a consultant for both the U.S. National Park Service and Parks Canada and has been an "on-air" expert for National Geographic, History Channel and Fox Family, as well as many regional media productions. Awards for contributions to Great Lakes maritime history have been received from Underwater Canada, Our World Underwater, Marquette Maritime Museum and Marquette County Historical Society. He is also the recipient of the 2006 Association For Great Lakes Maritime History Award for Historic Interpretation. The Award is presented annually in recognition of an individual making a major contribution over many years to the interpretation of Great Lakes maritime history in furtherance of the goals of the Association. In addition he was named the Marine Historical Society of Detroit’s “2007 Historian of the Year.” The award is the result of election by past MHSD Historians and recognizes persons who have actively contributed to the study of Great Lakes history. He holds a Master of Arts degree in History from Northern Michigan University, Marquette, Michigan.

Reviews

[Kayla · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is full of information and it is clear that the author knows his subject well. The writing style is all over the place however and in many cases ir distracts from the well researched meat of the book. For one thing this book suffers from excessive exclamation marks.

[John P · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dangerous Coast, aside from an opening introductory section and a closing section on lighthouses, consists primarily of a list, of sorts, of shipwrecks along the Pictured Rocks and nearby adjacent areas.

I would have liked the book more if the incident descriptions were more consistent in their descriptions listing, perhaps, the ship specs, history, primary incident, and final disposition (assuming the ship survived the primary incident) in always the same order.

The writing style is somewhat stilted and rough, and there are altogether too many exclamation points in the text.

Many of the grainy B&W photos are indecipherable in my copy although I imagine the original photos may not be much better.

We must applaud the author for including his sources after every incident but question the format he selected. The book would be 15%-20% thinner had he placed the sources compactly at the end of the work in a font the same size as the glossary and index.