Rating: 
Summary: Well told, but it's a story -- not a history
Review: This book is a wonderful example of a well-framed historical subject. It's not a history, though. Michael Capuzzo uses the 1916 shark attacks on the New Jersey coast as a lens through which to describe the America of that year. His pacing, the way he alternates between the shark and the people of the time, and his adroit use of primary sources all serve the book well. It's a fluid read... if only I trusted it."Close to Shore" is nonfiction in the sense that "The Perfect Storm" was nonfiction -- it's based on true events, and it's not really a novel, so where do you put it at the book store? It belongs in a category with television shows like "Walking with Dinosaurs" -- which presented dinosaurs in faux documentaries, speculating about an awful lot along the way. I loved "Dinosaurs," don't get me wrong. The problem is you're never sure with this kind of stuff where the established truths leave off and the speculation begins. Here, too, it's about 1916; you don't go into the exercise with as much skepticism about what we can possibly know about a stegosaurus. The glaring, enormous example of that problem in this book is: There's no way to know for sure that the shark -- or sharks -- responsible for the 1916 attacks was a great white, and there's a lot of evidence to the contrary. There's no way to know that it was an individual shark at all, to start with. More to the point, several obvious traits of the attacks, and especially the Matawan Creek attacks, fit the profile of bull shark attacks a whole lot better than they do the great white. Bull sharks, to mention the most obvious problem with the great white idea, routinely travel and can even live in fresh or brackish water like the water of Matawan Creek. People get attacked by them in circumstances like that, often in murky water. It's among the most common shark attacks. Great whites, by contrast, don't have the organ that lets bull sharks retain salinity in fresh water. They can't go there. It's not just that, though -- basically ALL the Matawan creek attack details point to bull sharks. The twisting style of the initial bite, the way the shark grabbed at feet and limbs and pulled, the apparent time it took with its first victim at the bottom of the creek, the murky water it struck in, the reported color of the shark itself -- all those things are characteristic of bull sharks. They just don't fit the great white profile. It's a huge reach to picture a great white doing anything like what this shark supposedly did. Richard Ellis, in his excellent Encyclopedia of the Sea, summarizes current opinion by saying most experts think these attacks were made by a bull shark (or sharks). In any case, as Capuzzo admits, the "rogue shark" idea has fallen into disfavor with scientists -- but the entire shark side of this story is predicated on that idea. Unfortunately, unlike a true history, Capuzzo's book can't stop and speculate: were the attacks on the shoreline by different sharks than the ones 11 miles inland? Was this a great white or a bull shark? More than one shark? Instead the author continues through the whole book describing the actual thoughts, leaving alone the movements and actions, of a single juvenile great white. He's using the shark as a sort of literary character, and he doesn't want to break character. That's what'll make you think of "Perfect Storm," in which we're given the actual thoughts of people who didn't return from the storm. How does the author know what they thought? Here we know what the shark is thinking. That's too far. What sharks in general might think would be okay. What this one particular shark felt as it was swept north on the warm waters of the gulf stream? That's a real reach. It detracts from the story. Where's that line between what he knows and what he's making up? Anyway, this is a very easy and entertaining read, and I'm not dying to puncture the balloon. The human side of the story is a lovely evocation of a gone time, and the subtitle of the book -- "A true story of terror in an age of innocence" -- only starts to do justice to that. It's just, when it comes does to it, I suspect the shark side is more "story" than "true."
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