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I love cross-section books. The works of Steven Biesty are some of my all-time favs to revisit. The intricate detail, Wimmelbinder fun of finding all the things in a lively and complex drawing is very soothing to certain noisy parts of my brain. As such, after I’d checked out at one of my favorite local bookstores, and saw Working Boats on the shelf post-checkstand, with its cross-section of an OSHA research vessel on the cover, I grabbed a copy and looped back through the checkout a second time.
This book is significantly aged down from what I expected, first of all. I don’t really consider that to be a bad thing. Especially with educational nonfiction, my preferred method for learning is to begin with a children’s book. It tends to cover all the fundamentals, does so with simple words and concepts, metaphors to aid understanding, and with bright colorful pictures designed to engage your brain. I’ve found that by starting with this as your foundation and building complexity on top of it with big boy books after that, I can learn quicker and grab the information more handily, as I’ve got these “bright” memories as the bedrock I pull from and then complexity to actually use for problem solving.
Does it work? The whole book took me about 45 minutes to read, and the following weekend I was able to wander around a Bellingham marina, identifying trollers and seiners by their rigging. Compare that with 30+ years of hearing my dad explain these concepts from his commercial fishing background, getting lost in the details, and always having to ask clarifying questions on “so is that one a gillnetter…?” when we see a boat go by.
Working Boats is a delightful little book, worth the less than an our of your time it’ll take you to read if you’re an adult, and even better if you have kids who will love it.
