Shoutin' into the Fog: Growing up on Maine's Ragged Edge - Softcover

Hanna, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0976323184 ISBN 13: 9780976323181

Publisher: Islandport, 2006

Synopsis

Shoutin' Into the Fog is a gritty Depression-era memoir of life in Midcoast Maine. Author Thomas Hanna, a longtime resident of Bath, grew up in the village of Five Islands on Georgetown Island, in a small, crowded bungalow pieced together on the edge of a swamp with secondhand wood and cardboard. He was the eldest son and the second of eight children born to his young mother and his father, a World War I veteran big on dreams, but low on luck. Drawing on insight gleaned from his eighty years, Hanna's Shoutin' Into the Fog is a book written with sensitivity, humor, and subtle emotion about a hardscrabble way of life, old-time Maine, and the meaning of both family and forgiveness. His personal tale casts an honest light not only on his own family, but helps illuminate a way of life common to the coast in the 1920s and 1930s that is slowly fading from memory.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas L. Hanna was a longtime resident of Bath, Maine. Raised in the village of Five Islands on Georgetown Island in Midcoast Maine, he left home at seventeen to join the U.S. Navy during World War II, and eventually made the Navy his career. He retired as a senior chief operations specialist after twenty years of service, and began a second career as a value engineer at Bath Iron Works. He retired in 1988 after twenty-two years. Then, using writing skills he had honed in the Navy and at BIW, he began writing for publication. His articles have appeared in Down East, Reminisce, and Good Old Days. Hanna died in 2008 at age eighty-one.

Review:

Shoutin into the Fog is a gritty/edgy reminder of a less present age, yet it manages in its tale of Great Depression living (and for an island family with eight children to raise) to have grace and humor and, above all, long flashes of the golden human spirit which recall Angela's Ashes at its most poignant. The stories Hanna tells will make a lot of us who share those sorts of memories (even from other parts of the country in which the Depression lingered long and amusements were caught on the fly) nod and smile or wince, and not forget even if we could. He hasn't and we are all the better for his telling. This is another very special book to give a real friend.
--The Courier-Gazette

About this edition

• Publisher: Islandport
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0976323184
• ISBN 13: 9780976323181
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 305