Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket Audiobook (Free)

Frank Conroy 1st visited Nantucket having a gang of college close friends in 1955. They arrived on a whim, as well as for Conroy it had been the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this “little, calm oasis in the sea.” This publication, part travel diary, part memoir, is certainly a hauntingly evocative and personal trip through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, tough moors, remote seashores, secret fishing places, and concealed forests and cranberry bogs. Admirers of Conroy’s traditional and acclaimed memoir Stop-Time will once again about Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket take pleasure in what Wayne Atlas, writing in the brand new York Times, known as his “genius for close observation.”

In Time and Tide, Conroy recounts the island’s history in the glory times of the whaling boom for this, when tourism dominates. He vividly evokes the clash of cultures between the operating class as well as the super-rich, with the delicate ecology of the isle always in the balance. But most exciting of all, he tells his personal story–of playing jazz piano in the island’s bars; of increasing a barn in the first ’60s by using a bunch of hippie carpenters; of leasing an old, failed bar with two island pals and turning it into the Roadhouse, a golf club “that was to be ours, the year-rounders, and to hell with the summer people.” There’s a marvelous tale of his initial golf game, performed on an ancient nine-hole program with two close friends, a part-time sommelier and a contractor in the South who developed the one-handed pepper mill.

This is a book that revels in friendship, music, history, and the gorgeous landscape of a distinctive American place, and is a wonderful work by among our greatest contemporary writers.