Book Review: Wild Acadia

Jerry and Marcy Monkman, frequent Yankee contributing photographers, first visited Acadia National Park together in 1989. Since then, they have traveled to the park at least once a year. Their love of Acadia is evident in their new book, Wild Acadia (University Press of New England), due out May 31. The book highlights this regional treasure with a blend of history and personal anecdote, followed by three short collections of photographs titled “Shorelines,” “Forests,” and “Granite Domes.” It’s not a coffee table book, however. The 9-by-9-inch pages often don’t allow the photos to be as stunning and impactful as you’d like. Still, the rich images — from a macroscopic detail of lichen to a bird’s-eye view of the rugged coastline — show us that the park is much, much more than a network of carriage roads on Mount Desert Island.