Just got back from 5 days of camping near Bar Harbor and spent 2 days roaming about Mt. Desert Island. The history intrigued me, particularly the old cottage-life of the wealthy set. A sucker for old photographs, i saw this in a book store, picked it up and was sucked right in! Amazing photographs of Bar Harbor and surrounding communities and the people who took advantage of all it had to offer between 1850 and 1950. And to top it off, the captions of the photos, more often than not, contained quotes from interviews of people alive at the time, letters, diaries, and period news accounts, giving it a very realistic flavor. On the downside, i would have loved to have had a map showing where all of these places and events took place, and often times, i was not always sure if some of these spectacular structures survived or not, something i always felt i wanted to know. I learned a tremendous amount about the island and am very glad i bought the book....now back to some fiction..... ( )