This book probably has a very narrow audiance, but it provides data on all of the descendants of John Coggeshall from his arrival in Newport Rhode Island on the ship Lyon in 1632 through the family members born through about the 1930s. There are some stories of the lives of family members.

The great photographs cannot salvage the horrible text which rambles off into areas completely removed from the subject matter. Benson's commentary is... well... odd. At times you wonder exactly what it is he's talking about. And the few warship photographs exhibit a great deal of bias against all things military. This is particularly odd since the Mariner's Museum, which has attached its name to this drek, earned its reputation primarily on the preservation and salvage of warship artificats from the USS Monitor. Just plain weird, this book should be avoided at all costs expecially if you've ever been a sailor in uniform.

I bought this book with great anticipation expecting a wonderful book on maritime photography. I am a fan of John Szarkowski and love his earlier work. While the choice of images is superb and the reproduction is wonderful, I was extremely disappointed by the text. Written by Richard Benson, it can only be characterized as bizarre, irrelavent and self indulgent. Opportunities to place the work in an historical or artistic context were often lost to flights of fantasy.

I own a signed copy of this book, and it sits proudly on my coffee table. I have read it twice already, and each time I learn something more about a specific photograph which I had not realized before. A great collection of images, from the Civil War to imported VWs on the dock in Baltimore, MD.