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of a tanker, cruise ship or container 

 ship get your engines throbbing, then this 

 could be the book for you. Rubin, who 

 achieved fame in North Carolina as founder 

 of Algonquin Books, leads readers on a tour 

 of 13 Southern seaports. Harrington, his 

 lifelong friend, provides colorful photo- 

 graphs of the enormous ships to which they 

 devote themselves. 



A kind of oceangoing road trip, the 

 book is a succession of boat rides, restaurant 

 meals and tankers looming out of the mist 

 Rubin and Harrington manage to talk their 

 way onto tugboats in almost every port, and 

 Rubin takes delight in listing the lengths, 

 drafts, widths and horsepower of the vessels 

 they spot You'll learn much about the boats 

 and discover the complex international 

 flavor of deep-sea shipping — the Greek- 

 owned ships based in Liberia carrying 

 lumber from Mobile, Ala, to Norway under 

 the watchful eyes of a Filipino crew. 



In the first glossy pages, you'll 



accompany the self-described "elderly ship 

 fanciers" as they help dock ships at the 

 Wando Terminal in their hometown of 

 Charleston, S.C. In later chapters, you can 

 watch paper being loaded in Wilmington, 

 dodge a hurricane in New Orleans, catch a 

 helicopter ride to an offshore oil-pumping 

 station in Louisiana and tour a nuclear 

 submarine near Jacksonville, Fla. Along 

 the way, you'll learn how each seaport's 

 fortunes rose and fell over the course of 

 history. 



Rubin's narrative also imparts local 

 color. Wilmington, for example, is famous 

 for its lumber trade, while Savannah, Ga, 

 is one of the world's biggest exporters of 

 kaolin, a fine white clay used in porcelain 

 and for coating paper. 



Engineers made Corpus Christi, 

 Texas, a powerful shipping center by 

 dredging a canal and excavating a 3,000- 

 foot harbor for the city. In Houston they 

 had only to enlarge an existing bayou. Still, 



water traffic there and in New Orleans is so 

 busy and complex that observation towers 

 and control rooms must be used to monitor 

 the ships. 



In Pascagoula, Miss., the author tours 

 a National Oceanic and Atmospheric 

 Administration fisheries facility and learns 

 about botdenose dolphin research. Rubin 

 also describes the "ecological nightmare" 

 of Tampa Bay, Fla., which is slowly being 

 reversed through the Tampa Bay National 

 Estuary Program. 



You will come away with a good 

 sense of the history and importance of each 

 of these cities and of the oceangoing traffic 

 that constantly shuttles into and out of 

 wharves and docks. The only flaw in this 

 remarkably informative book is some 

 shoddy editing. Typos abound, and one 

 chapter ends abruptly in midsentence, 

 never to be completed. I can't imagine that 

 Rubin, himself a famed editor, is very 

 happy with his publishers. □ 



COASTWATCH 29 



