Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916 in Around the World in 80 Books

Aug 10, 2022 Nadine in NY Jones rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, history, nj, era-early-1900s, beach-cover

As someone who vacations on Long Beach Island (New Jersey) every year, I was excited to read a book about the 1916 shark attacks off the coast of LBI. I did wonder how an entire book could be written about something that is adequately described in a brief news article (eg:
https://nj1015.com/remembering-the-je... or
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerse...
). Answer: Capuzzo positively LARDED this book with extraneous and often useless and unrelated information. Sure, it’s full of thrills and an As someone who vacations on Long Beach Island (New Jersey) every year, I was excited to read a book about the 1916 shark attacks off the coast of LBI. I did wonder how an entire book could be written about something that is adequately described in a brief news article (eg:
https://nj1015.com/remembering-the-je... or
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerse...
). Answer: Capuzzo positively LARDED this book with extraneous and often useless and unrelated information. Sure, it’s full of thrills and an easy page turner (provided you can stop laughing at some of the positively PURPLE prose), but it’s the opposite of concise.

Raritan and Sandy Hook bays formed a rich estuary that generated marine life for the entire coast … but this womb of the sea was a hostile place as well - subject to extremes of temperature, salinity, and chemical degradation as profound as any estuary in the world.

I really laughed at “womb of the sea.” I read this on the beach, and I took great pleasure in dramatically reading certain passages like this one out loud to my companions (they generally did not appreciate this).

I appreciated learning about the historical context: the social habits and expectations of the time, bathing attire and behavior, the weather that summer, a little background about each victim to make them feel like real people, trivia about Beach Haven in 1916, and (especially) scientific details about sharks. (Did you know that white sharks have excellent vision, and they can see people in a boat on the surface of the water? They also have the ability to sense the magnetic fields.). It was interesting to learn that there were no wind-pollinated plants on LBI until the train tracks were built, and seeds for goldenrod and ragweed were inadvertently included in the gravel base for the tracks.

I was also really interested to read about how skeptical most Americans were about shark attacks. After the first attack, the victim lived long enough to describe the shark, but local fishermen insisted it was more likely to have been a swordfish or sea turtle. After the third and fourth attacks, experts continued to speculate about it being orcas in the Matawan Creek instead of a shark.

Capuzzo does a great job of acknowledging that bull sharks are much more likely to be found in a freshwater creek than a great white, and he makes a convincing (to me) argument for this all being the work of a single white shark. He also made the shark extremely sympathetic. I felt bad for the victims, and I also felt bad for the poor, hungry shark.

But I didn’t really care about all the extraneous (and, frankly, boring) details about air pollution in Philadelphia, the long train ride to the shore, and alllll the info about Dr Eugene Vansant (whose son would be the first victim - after reading pages and pages about Dr Vansant, I expected HIM to be the victim!). The entire chapter about The Hildegard pleasure yacht added nothing to my experience. Capuzzo really pads it, the first attack doesn’t happen until page 94. After the first attack, Capuzzo goes on several tangents. Mrs Childs ordering her driver to take her to Deal to warn her niece had no bearing on the main plot. All of the details about swimming at Atlantic City were pointless - why do I care that Gertrude Schuyler had to be rescued from an undertow in Atlantic City??? What a red herring that section was! There were no shark attacks down in Atlantic City that season.

I definitely got the sense that Capuzzo did a lot of research, and then dumped EVERYTHING into this book. Where is a good editor when you need one?? ...more

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