I'm a Massachusetts resident who has been going to Maine to visit relatives and friends since I was a kid, so in many ways, I'm the ideal audience for this book. Woodard pits Massachusetts and Maine against each other, as four-hundred-year-old warring (sometimes literally) nations.

This is the second Woodard book I've read (and likely far from the last, looking at the rest of his line up.) I can't recommend his 2011 "American Nations" highly enough. The subtitle aptly describes the subject area: "a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America." As a Mainer looking at history and regional cultural difference, "The Lobster Coast" was essentially the pilot version of the more fleshed-out thesis of 2011. As a New Englander myself, I've been very excited to finally get around to reading "The Lobster Coast."

The book is superbly readable. I finished it in about a week. It begins with a few hands-on cultural portraits of Maine at the turn of the millennium (when the book was written). It then goes through the history over the last 400 years (briefly touching on the geological and Native American histories from the past few thousand years). It then concludes with a summary of current-day suburban sprawl, and a restatement of the ongoing tensions within the state.

I would love to hear an update on the Native American aspects of this history—for example, it seems like Woodard hadn't yet fully integrated the research of Charles Mann's 2005 "1491," (which is understandable, as it hadn't yet been published).

Contrary to popular belief, Plymouth and Jamestown were not the only early Brittish North American settlements: Popham, Maine was another settlement, established in 1607. One of the reasons we don't hear about it much is because it only lasted fourteen months. This kind of volatility is a repeating theme in Maine's history; the past four-hundred years have been a time of strife, famine, and migration. I won't articulate all of the ups and downs here, but the book is worth reading just as a record of all that Maine has been through.

All of this leads us to the core tension that Maine has faced. Starting about 300 years ago, Scotch-Irish asylum seekers became the primary settlers of Maine, and many towns and villages along the Maine coast are still named after them today. These people were farmers and fisherman, and prioritized long-term community stability. One example of this were the laws in the middle of the eighteen hundreds in Maine regarding shipping vessels. Each ship was required by law to split revenues according to the contributions of its crew. This lead to both an extremely equitable pay scale across all fishermen in the state, and also lead to a high degree of equity regarding boat ownership. Unfortunately, these laws came to end after the Civil War, but they were reflective of the kind of values shared by a certain set of Mainers.

On the other hand, we have Massachusetts, which has been a key antagonist in the plot of Maine's history. Up until 1820, Maine was even a territory of Massachusetts. This didn't sit well with Mainers, but did mean that a lot of Massachusetts-aligned individuals played a key role in the economics of Maine—from being a key market for Maine's fishing industry, to now being a key population of property-owning summertime beachgoers.

There's a poignant moment when one of these Scotch-Irish descendants walks into the new McDonalds and is greeted by a photo of her recently deceased father on the wall. She is horrified by this cultural appropriation. Understanding these kinds of dynamics goes a long ways towards understanding the animosity between various American Nations in recent electoral cycles.

This book is dominantly about the Maine coast, and touches very little on Maine's interior (New England's largest state, by acreage). This is likely because there has just been a lot more to talk about on the coast. That said, I'd be fascinated to learn more about the history of Maine's interior (one intriguing fact I learned recently is that, during the Cold War, Aroostook County was home to the US' largest air force base, although it was closed when the war ended).

If you love Maine and love cultural histories, this is the book for you! ( )

To live in Maine is to subscribe and ultimately surrender to a certain way of life. It is a proud life; an independent life. Take no grief from anyone and never ask for help. As they like to say, Mainers have grit.
Woodard is redundant in places and seems to skip around some, but for the most part his book, Lobster Coast is well researched and is an accurate portrayal of a way of life. It is a thoroughly engaging historical look back at Maine's fierce independence. From the very beginning there has been a strong distrust of strangers, well entrenched prejudices against "newcomers" and non-natives. ( )

At turns intriguing and amusing; a thoroughly enjoyable read. I got to hear Colin Woodard speak at a local bookstore on an island in Maine (sadly, the store is now defunct). He gives a great talk, and you can tell just how thorough his research is because he simply doesn't have to refer to any notes, and his talk includes a number of anecdotes that don't make it into the central narrative of the book. His coverage of the history of Maine and its denizens travels with ease back and forth across centuries in a way that supports, rather than distracts from, his storytelling and description of the various personalities that made Maine the way it is.

http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143035343 ( )

I didn't love this book. It's a really interesting history of Maine and New England, from settlement all the way up to the 21st century, and there are fascinating historical, oceanographic, sociological, political, and ecological facts all throughout, as well as interviews and anecdotes. But the book rambles quite a bit, and is a little repetitive in places. Woodard hammers pretty hard on his perception that Maine life is being irreparably changed by pressures from outside the state, and that's undoubtedly true, though there may be less confrontational ways of saying it. Still, an interesting read, and worth the time it takes. ( )