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About Bay Of Spirits: A Love Story
Product Description This is the story of a love affair with a people and a place, of the summers Farley Mowat spent sailing the Newfoundland coast with his wife Claire. It is an affectionate, unforgettable portrait of a time, a people, and a place, as well as the indomitable spirit of this island province. From Publishers Weekly In this ruminative memoir, Mowat chronicles the disappearance of a way of life in Newfoundland and the chance encounter that brought him the love of his life. As a young writer in 1957, Mowat decided to travel on a tramp steamer among the small fishing villages known as outports that dotted the Newfoundland coast. These outports were the home of hardy and colorful fisherfolk of Basque, English, Irish and French descent. Government policy and the depletion of the regional fisheries by huge commercial trawlers were slowly forcing the locals out of their centuries-old homes. Mowat enjoyed the area so much that he bought a schooner for further exploration. Soon afterward, a young woman fleeing the overeager attentions of an amorous mutt stumbled on board his ship and romance quickly followed. Mowat and Claire Wheeler spent the next decade sailing in the rocky bays, thick fogs and sudden squalls of the region. The author of 40 books, mostly on nautical and adventure themes, Mowat has a deep understanding of the sea and the natural world. His observations of the outporters are equally perceptive and provide a fascinating window into a little known corner of North America. In this tender elegy to a lost Newfoundland, Mowat shows an amused tolerance for almost everything except the human greed that has inexorably destroyed his adopted home's cultures and environment. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Canada's most idiosyncratic province is as large a presence as Canada's most idiosyncratic writer in this moving memoir of the love of a woman and the love of a particular place. In 1957, Mowat boarded a steamer that plied Newfoundland's rugged coastline. It was love at first sight, and Mowat would revisit often until he bought his Happy Schooner. On one Newfoundland nautical adventure he met Claire Wheeler. He was married to another then and had two small children. Never trying to justify his behavior, Mowat presents how he transferred his affections and his domicile matter-of-factly. The emotional heart of the story lies in remote Burgeo, Newfoundland, where he and Claire settled. The book concludes bittersweetly when the killing of a trapped whale nearly becomes an international incident with Mowat in the thick of it. Mowat has visited whale killing before ( A Whale for the Killing, 1972) but here offers a more personal perspective. In Newfoundland, he realized that, no matter how he loved this orneriest of provinces, he would forever remain a stranger. June Sawyers Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved About the Author Farley Mowat became a writer in 1949 after spending two years in the Arctic. He is the bestselling author of thirty-nine books, including Never Cry Wolf, Owls in the Family, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be, and The Boat Who Wouldn't Float. He and his wife, Claire, divide their time between Port Hope and River Bourgeois, Nova Scotia. From The Washington Post Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley In the summer of 1957, Farley Mowat was 36 years old. He had served with distinction in Europe in World War II, then returned to his native Canada, where he studied biology, married and had two sons. According to the biography in Wikipedia, "during a field trip to the Arctic, [he] became outraged at the plight of the Inuit people," which "led him to publish his first novel, People of the Deer," in 1952. It was the beginning of a very long, productive and distinguished writing career, one that has made him a celebrity in Canada and has brought much useful publicity to the humane and environmental
