Beach Haven

Bibliography
​Rowe, P. (2022). Vacuuming in the Nude and Other Ways to get Attention. Forefront Books.

Review by Michael Beach

The title to this book is misleading, on purpose. Peggy Rowe is mother to Mike Rowe. He’s a TV host, narrator and podcaster among other things. You might know him for shows like Dirty Jobs or Deadliest Catch. I listen to his podcast The Way I Heard It regularly. That’s where I’ve come to know about his mother Peggy and her books. She is a regular on the podcast and is hilarious.

Peggy Rowe is the author in question here, not Mike. She has been writing her entire life with some success, but mostly in local papers or specialty publications like articles in horse magazines. The point of this book was to look at her writing journey and eventual book publication. Her first published book didn’t happen until into her retirement years. This work is about the frustration, rejection, and eventual success in getting to publication. She has published three books. This one is her third. All three have been on the New York Times best sellers list. If the others are as good as Vacuuming, I’m tempted to read them. It’s full of humorous stories about her love-hate relationship with writing, family anecdotes, and perspective on growing older. Rowe includes some of her earlier short stories within the chapters, most of which are snippets of real-life experiences.
​
She gives a realistic perspective on people following their dreams. In her case it’s about writing. That idealism gets tampered in a few places as well. Success requires talent and persistence, and not just desire. She shows talent to be sure, but also notes mistakes made along the way. 

 

Bibliography
Dowling, D. O. (2016). Surviving the Essex: The Afterlife of America's Most Storied Shipwreck. Lebanon NH: University Press of New England.

​Review by Michael Beach

The version of Surviving the Essex I happen to have is an uncorrected proof. I have access to some books in this condition due to where I work. The actual shipwreck of the Essex was inspiration to at least two works of literature. The ship was a whaler out of Nantucket and was sunk after colliding with, or being rammed by, a large sperm whale. The accounts of survivors varies so it’s not all that clear exactly what happened. As you no doubt guessed, the work Moby Dick by Herman Melville was a take on the real-life story. The other work examined here by David Dowling was by Edgar Allan Poe titled The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. I read both of those works many years ago, so I found the connections Dowling makes to them informative. While Melville wrote in the man-versus-nature vain, Poe’s version focused on the dark themes of death and cannibalism.

After the Essex sank, the surviving crew split into two groups. There was disagreement which direction they should take their boats to find rescue. Captain George Pollard led one group, and his first made, Owen Chase, the other. Both suffered and cannibalism was involved. The first mate blamed the captain for leaving the ship during the whale hunt. He had joined one of the harpooning boats and left the mate in charge. Others blamed the poor ship handling of the mate during the whale encounter. The captain’s version was never published. The mate published a version that put himself in a heroic light. Decades later another crew member published an account as well.

There are many books published about the events of the wreck and its immediate aftermath. This book by Dowling is not one of those. Instead he turns his attention to sociological issues. For example, there is a question about the process one boat went through to select the victim on which the others would feed. The decision was to draw straws for both the victim and who would have to do the killing. There is disputation that in Pollard’s boat, he was the shooter and the victim was his nephew. Dowling explores the numerous conflicting accounts of survivors and especially Chase’s version. He also shows some parallels in Pollard’s second ship which also sank after striking a shoal. He explores how Pollard continued to live in Nantucket and became a solid community member despite the two ship-losses. He wraps up the work examining the anthropomorphism resulting from many authors ascribing human motives to the whale involved. Not unlike ‘Bruce’ in the movie Jaws, most depict a vindictive whale bent on revenge.

​The human-element for me was in the shaping of the story by survivors to cast themselves in the best light, the selling of the story in the form of profit making books, and imposing of human motives on the whale. Case eventually also captained a number of whaling ships later, but ultimately failed in economic endeavors. Pollard became a respected citizen of Nantucket. 

Bibliography
Abbott, A. (1988). The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Review by Michael Beach

In the vernacular of sociology, this book focuses on ‘boundary work’. Andrew Abbott looks at some of the more obvious points explored by others like how career paths become defined or known as a profession. He also looks at how professional groups form, compete, specialize and divide. Sociologically speaking, when a boundary is defined, however unclear, the result is division, insiders and outsiders. Abbott creates a framework to try to bring clarity around these issues.

After a literature review on professions, Abbott examines the base concept of professionalization. He describes what is and is not considered professional work, or better stated, what circumstances might be considered in defining it. He describes areas of professionalism such as claims of jurisdiction, implications of exclusionary efforts by those within a profession, and some of the sources of ‘disturbances’ that cause competition between and within groups of study disciplines. After discussing power dynamics (not necessarily in a Marxist concept of power) he speaks to larger social influences on professional organizations such as licensure, post-graduate credentialing, and national or international associations with specific codes of conduct.

The book finishes with several case studies around information science (librarians, computer scientists, etc.), lawyers, and various parts of the medical field. For example, he speaks to nursing professions in relation to medical doctors. In this particular example he notes how one profession is assumed to be somehow subsumed by the other. There is a form of hierarchy among medical professionals, even among branches of medicine itself.

Abbott notes that his system of professions is the process of “linking professions with tasks” (Abbott, 1988, p. 315). The system evolves as groups form around similar tasks, create some standards, then codify the profession. Evolution continues as specializations emerge within the group, competition begins over jurisdiction, and new professional boundaries result.