Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by Maine authors or set in the Pine Tree State.

AFLOAT AND ASHORE, by Roger F. Duncan, Blackberry Books, Nobleboro, Me., 2006, $16.95, 212 pages.

BY RICHARD DUDMAN

SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

If the only thing you have read by Roger Duncan is his “Cruising Guide to the New England Coast,” you have a treat in store. His new paperback collection of short essays, “Afloat and Ashore” is a treasure house of wisdom, obscure incidents and insights on getting along with the natural and social elements on both land and sea. Most of them are only a page or two in length.

He starts right out with a salute to lobstermen, Maine’s sturdy, courageous, competent, risk-taking, independent entrepreneurs. He disdains the current vogue of calling a lobsterman a “harvester,” which makes him sound like “a flatlander with manure on his boots and hayseed in his hair.” And he hates “lobsterperson” for a woman in the trade: “Man or woman, boy or girl, let the title of lobsterman stand proud.”

But then, with characteristic tolerance, he adds a note: “Farmers are admirable, necessary and honorable, but they are different from lobstermen and deserve a different name.”

That’s Roger Duncan in a nutshell: outspoken and decisive in his own opinions, but always giving a bit of ground to anyone who may disagree.

Take wooden boats, for example. His own Friendship sloop, “Eastward,” on which he cruised the Maine coast for many years, is made of wood, and he wouldn’t have a fiberglass “production boat.” He describes a wooden boat as “unique among the creations of man,” like painting, sculpture or elegant furniture, except that a wooden boat is “built to be used and often used hard: People trust their lives to her.”

But then comes the special Duncan touch: “The astute reader will notice that the writer in no way denigrates production boats. Obviously they have their place.”

Take sail versus power. He writes of the exhilaration, even exaltation, “when the rhythms of heart and breath are moving in harmony with the rhythm of sun and star, of wind and cloud, of wave and tide.” But then he adds that there are times when engine power is welcome.

And take summer people, whom he took out on “Eastward” for many years on sailing parties. He notes that he survives Maine winters by shoveling snow and cutting firewood while many of his friends either hibernate or, like the geese and the ospreys, fly south and “flutter about the golf courses of South Carolina and Georgia.” But in early April he rejoices “as the birds fly north, the bears come out of their caves and we welcome our friends again.”

As his title promises, Roger draws also on his experiences and musings on land, as a teacher, a student of history, and constant observer of both skills and stupidities. Watch for his explanation of how a forester successfully felled a tall brick chimney so that it went down like a tree precisely in the narrow gap between buildings that had to be saved.

Richard Dudman, who lives in Ellsworth and Islesford, sailed a wooden Friendship sloop for 29 years.

BY DALE MCGARRIGLE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

DARK HARBOR, by Stuart Woods, Putnam, New York 2006, hardcover, 304 pages, $25.95.

This time out, author Stuart Woods, a part-time Mount Desert Island resident, has compiled an all-star edition of sorts.

Much like he did in 2004’s “Reckless Abandon,” Woods brings together the characters in the Stone Barrington novels, including policeman-turned-lawyer Barrington and his ex-partner, detective Dino Bacchetti, and those of the “Orchid Beach” novels, headed by small-town police officer Holly Barker, now a trainee with the CIA, in “Dark Harbor.”

The novel is set in, of all places, Islesboro. The family of Barrington’s cousin, Dick Stone, meets with foul play, and soon, as his executor of Stone’s will, Barrington is snooping into his death.

Before long, there’s a series of seemingly unconnected deaths. Yep, there’s a serial killer loose on Islesboro.

Sure, this strains credibility a wee bit, but no more so than having all these different characters finding a valid reason to visit a small island in Penobscot Bay.

Anyway, a lot of reading Woods’ novels is suspending disbelief and just enjoying the ride. Even solving the mystery itself sometimes becomes secondary to the breakneck pacing, and that’s the case here again. “Dark Harbor” is a nice place to visit, and by the time the crime is solved, you’d even want to live there.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

CAMDEN: A PLACE IN TIME, oral histories researched and edited by Donna Gold for the Camden Public Library; Northern Lights Press, Stockton Springs, 2004-05; saddle-stitched pamphlets, $7 each.

“Camden: A Place in Time” is the umbrella title of a series of pamphlets containing interviews with midcoast Mainers recalling what life was like before television. Four booklets have been completed in the last couple of years, offering the stories of Ellen Doucette, Joan Tibbetts, Alice Alley and Ruth Johnson.

The texts are transcriptions of taped interviews, with minimal cutting, pasting and arranging by editor Donna Gold, and we hear, straight from the horse’s mouth as it were, anecdotes and descriptions of early and mid-20th century midcoast Maine. In “Three Hundred Chickens for Our Wedding Reception,” Ruth Johnson tells of raising, killing and plucking chickens on a poultry farm in Camden. In “To Me, That’s the Smell of Money: Alice Alley and Her Years at the Knox Mill,” Alley recounts (for example) how she met her husband, “Peanut” Alley, at a dance one night in the 1930s at the Ocean View Ballroom in Rockland.

“Things Has Changed: Ellen Doucette & Her Century of Life” and “A Life in Camden: Joan Tibbetts’ Stories of Soldiers, Harpists & Edna St. Vincent Millay” offer similar material. Six more testimonials are being prepared.

Interviewer Gold seems surprised to learn that before World War II young women went to dances and people journeyed on foot to distant places like school, but the women clearly feel they’re just relating bedrock memories of life itself. They tell their stories with matter-of-fact good humor salted frequently with characteristic Maine wryness.

Since each text is transcribed from a single afternoon’s question-and-answer period and is, probably wisely, only minimally touched up, the women’s stories wander in and out of chronology and don’t sustain the narrative profluence of formal autobiography. So the reading is not riveting, but has its rewards when bright nuggets from pre-1960s Maine – a much different place from now – pan out.

As the Camden Public Library officials who commissioned the project (with help from MBNA when it used to be helpful) are no doubt well aware, these pamphlets are likely to provide future historians with useful and often entertaining material.

More information about the series and purchasing the booklets is available at www.personalhistory.org.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

EXPLORING STONE WALLS: A FIELD GUIDE TO NEW ENGLAND’S STONE WALLS, by Robert M. Thorson; Walker & Co., New York, 2005; 187 pages, trade paperback, $14.

If you’re one of the many amateur naturalists who poke around in the woods looking for out-of-the-way stuff, your eye is probably drawn to old stone walls. What the walls were used for and who built them are matters of curiosity and fun speculation.

Robert Thorson’s “Exploring Stone Walls” extends the speculation to a full-length book. The first few chapters provide groundwork in the geological uses of everyday words. “Rock,” for example, means large, hard, mostly underground material, and “stone” means small pieces of rock, hence “stone” walls not “rock” walls. Thorson explains that stone walls are larger and smaller, in better and worse states of repair, and well and poorly crafted. At the end of the book is a key for identifying walls in six categories concocted by the author: freestanding, flanking, raising, impoundment, foundation and confinement. What these terms refer to, you can unearth from the text.

This book may stack up well for you if you’re the kind of naturalist who regards every offhand remark about bird, beast or stone as just curious good fun. But if you value accuracy, you may want to hold off buying it.

As Thorson is a professor of geology, the preliminary material on stones and minerals seems correct, if not very carefully presented. But much of the rest is, well, kind of rocky. Thorson apparently made a lot of road trips looking for walls and photographing them, but there’s a hasty, provisional feel to many of the details and conclusions. One section, for example, scoffs at the distinction between architecture and landforms as “arbitrary,” while the next chapter demolishes the point in an enthusiastic discussion of walls as creative art forms. A lot of dubious disjointures like this, large and small, along with chronic imprecision in the writing (even the needless redundancy in the title was overlooked), suggest a general lack of care for accuracy.

It’s fun to wonder about the origins and purposes of stone walls, and this book calls attention to some features that might contribute to your conjectures. But despite the author’s professional credentials, this is largely meandering speculation, not the concise basic science we expect in good field guides.