Interesting Expose Of A Particular Community, Suffers From Problems Typical Of Its Form. As an almost anthropological examination of a particular culture that arose over decades in a very specific region of California – the roughly six square mile region known as Richardson’s Bay, an offshoot of San Francisco Bay – this text is a pirate’s treasure trove. Specifically, as it examines the “unhoused” people who have claimed homes among the derelict and otherwise vessels floating in the bay, the so-called “anchor-outs”, it truly does a phenomenal job detailing the history of how the culture arose, a lot of the features of the specific culture, and even a lot of both the key historical figures of it and at least some of its living practitioners.
As a *journalistic* piece… it may fly in today’s “lived experience” version of “journalism”, where objectivity and distance from subject are defenestrated in favor of being “up close” and “real”… but it still would have been enhanced by being a more old school journalistic type text, at least to my mind.
Instead what we get here is almost an action, thriller, and memoir mashup wherein the author inserts his own views into the text, but the story itself becomes one of a community’s fight for its right to survive and the dastardly developers and government officials seeking to eradicate it from history once and for all.
Which for a narrative, works well. For what is supposed to be a nonfiction work… maybe doesn’t work as well.
The star deduction comes in from the dearth of bibliography, which is likely due to not much written work existing about this particular group or its history, but still, there is quite a bit here that *could* have been documented more thoroughly, if even detailing newspaper or other media reports about various events over the years.
Very much recommended.
This review of Lost At Sea by Joe Kloc was originally written on March 17, 2025.
