Floating Coast

Reviews / Votes

"In Floating Coast, Bathsheba Demouth has written a brilliant hybrid book about one of the most fragile and forgotten of Anthropocene front-line territories, the Bering Strait. Uniting ecology, anthropology, reportage and more, this is a superb work of environmental history, often reminiscent to me of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams in its combination of rigorous research, intense looking and listening, and its clear ethical vision." -- Robert Macfarlane "... Demuth has now herself written the history she calls for. Floating Coast is a historian's Moby Dick, a great white whale of a book that spans centuries and links landscapes, living beings, and the flux of time, into a marvelously readable narrative." -- Amitav Ghosh "Floating Coast is an extraordinary piece of history writing, seamlessly weaving together disparate elements. It is astonishingly rich in ethnographic detail, ecological precision, economic circumstance and historical texture." -- Nature "Demuth, an environmental historian at Brown University, has reaped rich and fascinating material from the oral history of the indigenous Beringians recorded by ethnographers." -- Literary Review "Floating Coast is rich, well researched and illuminating. It keeps under readers' feet the vastness of Demuth's expertise, as solid as a land bridge." -- The International New York Times