Bøker av Bland Simpson

Into the Sound Country is a story of rediscovery--of two North Carolinians returning to seek their roots in the state's eastern provinces. It is an affectionate, impressionistic, and personal portrait of the coastal plain by two natives of the region, writer Bland Simpson and photographer Ann Cary Simpson. Here Bland Simpson tours his old waterfront haunts in Elizabeth City, explores scuppernong vineyards from Hertford to Southport, tramps through Pasquotank swamps and Croatan pine savannas, and visits Roanoke River oyster bars and Core Banks fishing shanties. Ann Simpson's original photographs capture both the broad vistas of the sounds and rivers and the quieter corners of mossy creeks and country churchyards. Her selection of archival illustrations ranges from the informative to the humorous, from a turpentine scraper at work in the 1850s to a pair of little girls playing with a horseshoe crab on a Beaufort porch at the turn of the century. A memorable journey into eastern Carolina's richly varied natural world, Into the Sound Country is for anyone who would spend a while in one of America's most intriguing and underexplored areas.

The extraordinary wreck of a ship, a missing crew, a message in a bottle, the lost captain's determined daughter - these are all elements of a great sea yarn. The fate of the Carroll A. Deering has remained one of the mysteries of maritime history. Simpson's chronicle keeps the story alive, a memorial to the ghost ship and its lost crew.

This memoir blends Bland Simpson's personal experience with travel narrative, oral history and natural history to create a portrait of the Great Dismal Swamp and its people.