Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay

Warner, an administrator at the Smithsonian Institution, was nearly sixty when he published this book, his first. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977, and has never been out of print since. It's a graceful and curious book about ingenuity, both of the watermen of the Chesapeake Bay (they are nearly all men in his telling), who have to divine the yearly and daily patterns of the bay to draw a living out of the water, and of their quarry: the blue crab, which occupies the same iconic position in that estuary as the salmon does in ours. And like the salmon, the crab, and the industry built around it, has been in decline, but Warner wrote in a time of relative plenitude, which reads now as a warning, and an expression of lost joy.