Live Yankees.
Bunting, W. H.
Tilbury House, Publishers., ( (2009).), Gardiner ME.
25.5 cm. xv, (i), 496 pp. b/w plates.
Price: $25
First edition. “The Sewalls and Their Ships.” Thirty years ago I was hired to defend an appraisal of the Sewall family papers that had been challenged by the IRS. The appraisal took weeks because the Sewall papers filled two entire rooms of a building in the Sewall shipyard in Bath, Maine and it soon came to seem that the Sewalls had their fingers in every pie from Hawaii to Havre and beyond. This is a magnificent book, a sprawling maritime history of that sprawling family. The author, old friend Bill Bunting, has done himself proud in research and writing, and the wealth of photographic documentation – the family never threw anything away – make the book come to life. My counter-appraisal was a success. We defeated the IRS challenge, most likely because I pointed out that their appraiser had misspelled the name of Mark Hennessy, author of the major book about the Sewall family. If he couldn’t even get the guy’s name right, I argued, how could we trust anything else about his evaluation? Fine condition in dust jacket.
