The Secret Life of Lobsters

by Trevor Corson

The Northeast Regional Book Club will be meeting from April 27-June 8, 2023 to discuss Trevor Corson’s The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean.

“Lobster is served three ways in this fascinating book: by fisherman, scientist and the crustaceans themselves. . . . Corson, who worked aboard commercial lobster boats for two years, weaves together these three worlds. The human worlds are surely interesting; but they can’t top the lobster life on the ocean floor.”  — Washington Post

In this intimate portrait of an island lobstering community and an eccentric band of renegade biologists, journalist Trevor Corson escorts the reader onto the slippery decks of fishing boats, through danger-filled scuba dives, and deep into the churning currents of the Gulf of Maine to learn about the secret undersea lives of lobsters.

Please check back for links to reading quide questions to accompany each chapter.

Resources:

This Wakelet collection includes additional supporting articles and multimedia resources curated by Teacher at Sea Alumni.

Gotham Unbound

by Ted Steinberg

This book club will take place in Fall 2023.

Winner of the 2015 PROSE Award for US History.

Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York, by Ted Steinberg, recounts the four-century history of how hundreds of square miles of open marshlands became home to six percent of the nation’s population. Ted Steinberg brings a vanished New York back to vivid, rich life. You will see the metropolitan area anew, not just as a dense urban goliath but as an estuary once home to miles of oyster reefs, wolves, whales, and blueberry bogs. That world gave way to an onslaught managed by thousands, from Governor John Montgomerie, who turned water into land, and John Randel, who imposed a grid on Manhattan, to Robert Moses, and Charles Urstadt.

“Steinberg’s volume begins with Henry Hudson’s arrival aboard the Half Moon in 1609 and ends with another transformative event—Hurricane Sandy in 2012.” (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland)