Green Shingles

Peter Svenson begins his elegant, idiosyncratic exploration of the Chesapeake Bay at the doorstep of his own home--a green shingled house perched high on Mitchell's Bluff, looking out across the Bay's busy shipping lanes toward the western shore. Svenson invites us to explore various aspects of the world outside his door, from the bayside community in which he lives to the Chesapeake's complex and fragile ecosystem. He gives us an insider's look at the arcane art of canoe sailing, the exigencies of landscape painting, and life aboard the sturdy tugboats that travel up and down the long bay. A thoughtful meditation on the intersection of the human and natural worlds, Green Shingles offers a unique look at America's largest estuary from one of the region's finest writers. "There is much here that will interest readers hereabouts, for the Chesapeake Bay is a place about which many of us dream and which a few of us are privileged enough to have made home ...Svenson sees his environmentalism through a clear eye, one that appreciates not merely natural wonders but human accomplishments."
--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post "A courageous book welding natural history and fast-paced landscape change in a glimmer as bright as the Bay."--John Stilgoe, Harvard University, author of Outside Lies the Magic "Peter Svenson's rigorously detailed recollections ...are so rich in fact and so powerfully constructed as to make high adventure of something as seemingly mundane as a shift on a Coast Guard buoy tender. Svenson has the eye of an artist obsessed with detail and the curiosity of a reporter enraptured by the who, what, when, where, why, and how of just about anything. And it's all under one roof in Green Shingles."--J. Taylor Buckley, USA Today "Fascinating ...Svenson skillfully uses his artist's eye to describe the ever-changing panoramas unfolding from Mitchell's Bluff--the colors of the sky and water, the lure of weather and wind current."--Susan Q. Stranahan, Baltimore Sun