“Taken by the Sea” A Paired Reading with Sarah Conover and Paul Lindholdt

Set Adrift: My Family’s Disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle, a Mystery and a Memoir (55 Fathoms Publishing, 2023) by Sarah Conover

Interrogating Travel: Guidance from a Reluctant Tourist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023) by Paul Lindholdt

      Set Adrift: In January 1958, one of the most renowned sailing families of the Eastern Seaboard vanished during a freak storm in the Bermuda Triangle. The youngest of two orphans, Sarah Conover grew up never knowing her parents and grandparents—those who were lost.  Set Adrift, Conover’s hybrid memoir, weaves her life story with interviews, official Coast Guard reports, and the national media’s investigation of the Revonoc’s fate, to chart her life story and the mystery of her family’s disappearance.

       Interrogating Travel: Travelers may be taken by the sea to places far away for pleasure, or taken never to return, as happened to Paul Lindholdt’s son. Interrogating Travel tells that story. Travel also causes slow violence to the planet – via carbon spewed by planes – and to Indigenous people via encroachments on their lands. One antidote the book prescribes is to reinvest in local environs by hiking, kayaking, birdwatching, and by looking closely at the web of life.