On the Vineyard
A Year in the Life of an Island
by Jane Carpineto
Overview
From the Publisher
Even before the Clintons made Martha's Vineyard one of their favorite vacation spots, the island had a firmly established reputation as a special place. In this profile, Carpineto interviews the natives to examine how the island has changed, where it has come from, and where it is going. of photos.
My thoughts
This book totally isn't working for me!
The author spent all her summers as a child on the vineyard before it became a hot tourist spot. She never appreciated it at the time, as most children wouldn’t, and even as an adult the island never really called to her. So now she’s decided to go back and live for a year on the island to see what it’s really about. The book started with a lot of promise. She was dredging up pleasant childhood memories about making it to the ferry on time for the crossing, about the residents greeting them when the ferry docked, about the parties on the islands, about how difficult it was to leave each year, etc., etc., etc. All of that was very good and interesting and thought-provoking. Now she’s ditched her husband and kids to live on the island and she’s going around with a notepad in hand, interviewing residents who bag the progress of the island and long for the old days. It’s turned into an anti-capitalism spiel written by an affluent author who grew up in a privileged life. That doesn't work for me!
I’m not even to page 50 yet – Nancy Pearl’s magic number of pages, of course – and I’ve had enough of the whining. It reads like an essay she was forced to write in school. Your assignment today: go to Martha’s Vineyard, interview some old time residents and write a 500 word essay by Thursday. I’m not feeling the story. I’m feeling the author’s need to write a book and make some more of that capitalistic income that she seems to reject on Martha's Vineyard.
Least Favorite Passage
No less intriguing than the people that my new acquaintances include are those they omit from their list of undesirables. Black Americans (who have been coming to the island in increasing numbers for four decades) are noticeably absent. Could it be that the Martha's Vineyard is the one place in America where black people are not held responsible for social decline? Not only do I hear no such suggestion from my group, but neither do I hear any in my subsequent conversations with white islanders. The silence is refreshing, but I wonder if it is a veneer covering something more sinister. That question will wait until I can give it the attention it deserves.
