An Island Out of Time : A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake [Hardcover]

Tom Horton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1996

A small island home to five hundred watermen and their families, Smith Island is the subject of an elegant study about a community that has stayed true to its past while witnessing the decline of the natural wonders surrounding it in Chesapeake Bay. Tour.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Although the archipelago known as Smith Island sits in Chesapeake Bay, just off Maryland's eastern shore, it is in some ways a place lost in time and space. Lacking a police force, a high school, or a hospital, it still carries the flavor of another era. People earn a tough living from crabbing, which means 18-hour work days for six months of the year, and they still speak a heavily accented language that some scholars believe dates back to Elizabethan times. In 1987, Tom Horton, an environmental writer for the Baltimore Sun, moved with his family to this 300-year-old community. This thoughtful, well-written book is his record of the two years they spent there.

From Publishers Weekly

Lying 10 miles off Maryland's eastern shore, Smith Island has been a fishing community for more than 300 years. It is a tightly knit, highly religious, hardworking Protestant community with a population of fewer than 500. There are no police, no jail, no local council; here, the church fills the role of government services. Horton, a former environmental reporter for the Baltimore Sun, lived on the island for two years, interviewing inhabitants and taking part in local activities. He tells an eloquent story of people intimately connected to the island who live by catching crabs (100 million pounds of blue crabs annually), oysters, terrapin and rock bass. He notes that boats are to the islanders what the horse was to the cowboys of the Old West. Horton writes about "progging" (foraging), a cat roundup, hunting and poaching, the seasons on the island. Looking to the future, he gives Smith Island another century before it is drowned by the bay. Readers who enjoyed William Warner's Beautiful Swimmers will be eager to read this memoir. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 316 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (June 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393039382
• ISBN-13: 978-0393039382
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,201,392 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rare, insider's view of a unique way of life., January 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: An Island Out of Time : A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake (Hardcover)

An avid reader of publications like National Geographic, I found this book to be a very enjoyable and accurate depiction of an area that receives too little attention. The only thing that could improve this story would be full color photographs illustrating the brilliant sunsets, changes in water color, the wildlife and the characters that are detailed throughout. This book sparked such an interest in the area that my family currently is searching for a new home on the Crisfield side of the Bay. We appreciated the pace of life and the simplicity that have caused the locals to resist change and embrace their past. Many thanks to the author for clueing us in.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Almost poetic, Horton captures the spirit of time and place., June 19, 1998

By 

Bill Nerenberg ([e-mail]) (Cockeysville, Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake (Paperback)

Tom Horton's "An Island Out of Time" is more than just a documentary of life on Smith Island, it's a paean to individuality, to spirituality, and to the love of things natural whether they result in environmental disaster or reclamation. The uniqueness of life on a semi-isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay is also a refreshing look at the idea of community - unburdened by political correctness or ultra-sophisticated analysis. Horton waxes poetically about the sun's play over the marshes, or the clarity of the water, the coldness of the waves in a storm, and the gradual decay of the island's ability to survive. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who wants to understand the real impacts of the Chesapeake - or celebrate its uniqueness.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Warning if You Like Cats -- Chapter on Mass Killing of Cats, April 1, 2010

By 

Blake Schwalbe - See all my reviews

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This review is from: An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake (Paperback)

Although the book is indeed well written, please be advised that if you like cats you may have a hard time getting past a chapter where Mr. Horton describes his efforts to kill many cats (mostly through trapping them in barrels and taking them to the mainland to be gassed), because they caused problems for his asthmatic son. I really couldn't get past it, and have taken a dim view of the whole book because of it.

The background information leading to this chapter is troubling, because it paints a picture of a father willing to risk the health of a severely asthmatic child by taking him to an island where emergency medical care is available only via a harrowing boat ride to the mainland (described in the book), where the atmosphere is horridly humid and difficult to withstand for healthy individuals, and where the a large population of beloved cats roam freely everywhere. Mr. Horton describes the qualms of his wife who is really unwilling to uproot herself to live on the island, and his serious concerns for the health of his son. But he is determined that his son should experience the idyllic life of the island whether he wants it or not, but the conflicts concerning his desire to recreate for his son the same childhood experiences that he had himself as a child, with what appears to be overwhelming frustration with the impediments to this wish presented by his son's health issues, result in Mr. Horton displacing his anger on the cats that lived near the schoolhouse his son attended. After you read the chapter on the cat killings, it throws previous threads in the narrative in an entirely different light. What appeared to be obstinacy against better judgement (really risking his son's life because of the difficulty in reaching emergency medical care), becomes the portrait of a callous father displacing the anger he should feel toward himself in a charming chapter of descriptions of animal cruelty.