The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 19 August 2012
by John McDonald
Stories are part of the basic fabric of any culture. We tell each other all kinds of stories and some of our stories go all the way back to the ancients. They have that much staying power. They carry that much amusement or that much of a lesson to us even today. The nature of story telling, however, has certainly changed, especially how we transmit those stories to each other. Today, emails circulate, telling and retelling rumors and stories from around the internet. Jokes, tales, politics. Some of the stories that appear in our email boxes today are just versions of things that go all the way back, again, to the ancients. So, in this book of stories by Maine story-teller and radio personality John McDonald, it may not come as a surprise that a few of them are just Maine-centered versions of things you may have seen in your email in-box in the past few years. Mr. McDonald tells a good story, very short pieces, most of which have appeared in his newspaper column (there's another increasingly archaic method of transmitting stories: newspapers). These are bits and vignettes of life in Maine, the culture of the place, if you can call it that, and its particular sense of itself. Fishing villages, yard sales, back country tales, reaction to outsiders, the scourge of tourism, all of these make repeated appearances throughout this book. But it is a light journey through McDonald's stories about Maine. It isn't particularly biting. It is gently amusing. These are easy-going stories of people and places in what the license plates call Vacationland. But it also gives the reader a small insiders view into the identity of the place. And that is what storytelling is so often about, the way the people of a place view themselves and the world around them. McDonald does Maine this service.
(Full disclosure: As far as he knows, the author of this mini-review has no relation to the author of this book (except, perhaps, very distantly).)