The book was very exciting in concept, academic in execution. I said as much. The author, James P. Delgado responded with this:
That book was entirely for my fellow archaeologists. Watch for the trade version. Lots of pics, but far better will be the stories that the academic side of the house did not want - madness, drunken excess, floating brothels, the rats, the rotting hulks. Bret Harte's favorite story about a drunk hauling to one night on a darkened street to see a ship, surrounded by landfill, looming before him in the gloom, and thereby resolving never to drink again. A ghost of a dead sailor whose fiddle is said to be audible as he plays, entombed with his ship, beneath the sidewalks of the city.
And the fun stories of what it was like to exhume all that lost and forgotten history, with the smell of the fire of '51 so sharp and strong 140 years later you'd swear it just happened, or the spilled and spoiled booze sepulchered with the buried hulks that upon excavation reminded me of the aftermath of a frat party from hell.
Um...yeah. I will be reading that book indeed. I will be traveling into the future to be reading that book, actually. Actually, expect only to see me in the future, because I have left already.
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