Maryland Lost and Found...Again by Eugene L. Meyer

Product Details

J. H. Diehl - Children's Literature

This classic portrait of Maryland is part history, part travelogue, part cultural barometer, here updated for the 21st century in a new edition with more illustrations and epilogues to stories from the original book. "To write about Maryland," says the author, an award-winning reporter for the Washington Post who traveled the state extensively during the 1970s and 1980s, "is, in a sense, to write about America...within its borders is a generous slice of American pie: megalopolis, Appalachia, the Chesapeake Bay, the Deep South, the industrial North, rich farmland, a major port, the nation's capital, the primary car and rail routes carrying East Coast interstate traffic." Each chapter of the book pays homage to a distinct region of Maryland, evoking its rich and sometimes troubled history, and how that history informs the present. The tone is affectionate yet clear-eyed, mincing nothing when it comes to examining Maryland's legacy as a Civil War border state. From the watermen of the Eastern Shore, the midshipmen and state lawmakers of Annapolis, to the dwindling mining towns in the mountains of Western Maryland, these essays mainly discuss life outside the Washington, D.C. suburban sprawl. Recommended for Maryland residents (who will be amazed by what they learn about their state) travelers and students of American studies. As the author says, "If the state lacks coherence...it is this fact that makes it so endlessly fascinating." 2003 (orig. 1986), Tidewater Publishers, Ages 14 up.