William Stanek's The Living Acadia Biography
Ice, Ocean, and the Making of a Coastal Wilderness

Acadia was made where stone, ice, and ocean met. Granite formed deep underground. Glaciers reshaped mountains and valleys. Rising seas flooded a broken coast. Tide, forest, fire, wind, and weather continue to remake the island edge. William Stanek's The Living Acadia Biography follows that landscape through Wabanaki relationships, coastal travel, settlement, tourism, philanthropy, preservation, road and carriage-road design, fire, ecological change, and the creation of a national park unlike any other. Acadia's intimacy can make it seem simple. Its biography reveals a complicated coastal world shaped not only by nature, but by choices about land, access, design, ownership, memory, and what kind of landscape Americans believed should endure.