A review by tmilligan
Chesapeake by James A. Michener

4.0

If you would like to know about the history of ways of life on the Eastern Shore, this book's for you. It's very long, but this is understandable as it covers a few hundred years. The author thinks that your personal strengths and weaknesses are greatly fueled by those of your ancestors, which feels like a subversive idea in this age of autonomy, but perhaps it is truer than I want to admit. The book, by it's very nature as historical fiction, suffers some problems of erasure whenever the characters affect the world beyond their fictional town on the Choptank - if it was not Paxmore who campaigned ardently for Maryland to not totally disenfranchise African-Americans in the years of Jim Crow, who was it? But this could not be helped without using real people for characters or having everyone in Patamoke stay strangely at home for centuries. I can't imagine anyone wanting to read this unless they were from Maryland, or at least very interested in it, but I do recommend it as long as you can take the length.