ADVENTURES, BLIZZARDS, AND COASTAL CALAMITIES

A collection of numberless anecdotes about the New England coast, including Boston and Cape Cod, by an author who has written nine other chronicles of the region. Some of his stories are better than others, and some of the biggest get slighted. For example, Snow is already at work legendarizing the Blizzard of 1978, but he goes about it without the descriptive force the subject could bear. He is better on the story of James Merry, who was taken by the bullfights he'd seen in Spain as a Gloucester sailor. Merry bought himself a very young bull, began wrestling it to earth as a calf, and as it grew he remained its master. Then one day in July 1892 he announced that he was going to hold the first bullfight in Dogtown (Mass.), and he fitted himself out in a brilliant matador's costume and wrestled his growing bull to earth. Months passed, until the bull grew so big that Merry lost a match. Later, he got drunk, went out to wrestle the bull alone, and was gored to death. Other stories that may interest shut-ins are about the building of the Minot light tower in the raging sea (two men drowned when it collapsed); about the strange inscriptions on Dighton Rock (were they made by visitors from Atlantis, lost tribes of Israel, Phoenicians, Norsemen, Catholic missionaries?); about the two men blown out to sea on a haystack surrounded by loose ice. An interesting bundle but it doesn't always deliver.