More hints
and reflections from Lincoln Paine.
What helped make your book tour a success?
It was
helpful that I had had 26 reviews—12 in the U.S., the rest from England, India,
Australia, and China); and 3 honors. I’ve also caught a few odd shout-outs here
and there, the most unlikely being in Gregg Easterbrook’s “season-ending book
recommendations” on ESPN.com, the sports network, back in February, and the
English rapper and journalist Akala’s “book list” last month.
What about the venues? Were any of the events
particularly delightful?
The variety
of venues makes it difficult to single out any one of them. I got to stay at a
number of stately institutions, including the Metropolitan Club in Washington,
the Union Club, and a number of yacht clubs, including the American (Rye, New
York), the New York, and St. Francis (San Francisco).
The
engagement that had the greatest impact on me was a talk I gave at the College
of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. The impact was not just that I couldn’t
believe how dead Bar Harbor is in wintertime—the signs outside the shuttered
hotels are under wraps to protect them from the elements. Preparing for my talk
I discovered that all students at the College of the Atlantic major in human
ecology, which is the study of how people interact with the social,
technological, and natural environments.
Why does this stand out in your
memory?
It seems to
me that that you can define maritime history in exactly the same way, and I
have in fact used that formulation in every talk I’ve given since. COA
describes itself as “for idealists with elbow grease,” and its student body is
about as unlike that of a service academy as one can imagine. Yet when I told
students at King’s Point and SUNY Maritime that their curriculum and chosen
careers were essentially about human ecology—interacting with the social,
technological, and natural environments—they didn’t bat an eye.
Route masters in the Indian Ocean c.1410 Bridgeman Art Library One of the illustrations from The Sea & Civilization |
Any other pluses?
Another
venue that was an unexpected delight was the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long
Beach, and not just because they flew me cross-country—which opened up the
possibility of my speaking elsewhere in California—but because most of their
guests are oceanographers and conservationists, subjects that I address only
fleetingly.
Being asked
to speak there was a treat because I feel, perhaps wrongly, that the
oceanographic community doesn’t normally engage their discipline historically,
and this invitation seemed like something of a breakthrough.
Were there any serendipitous
encounters?
At the
Hotchkiss Library signing I sat a few seats away from Francine Prose, and
having just read Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, introduced myself. She seemed as
bemused by the ending of her book as I am. I also got to meet the novelist and
memoirist Kate Christensen at an event hosted by The Telling Room where we were
featured authors. I had seen her at a reading and we live in the same small
city and would certainly have met at some point through mutual friends, but it
was still pretty exciting.
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