Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence

Four cassettes, 6 hrs.
Read by Len Cariou

Four deaths. One maiming. One shark. . .

In mesmerizing detail, journalist Michael Capuzzo’s CLOSE TO SHORE recounts the dramatic true story of a series of shark attacks that occurred along the New Jersey shore in July 1916 — resulting in the largest shark hunt in history, and the end of Americans’ naivete about the dangers of the sea. Anchored by harrowing and graphic recreations of a rogue Great White Shark’s attacks on five swimmers in two beach towns —as well as in a farming community eleven miles inland — the narrative examines the behavior of the ocean’s greatest predator and the lives and worldview of pre-World War I Americans. The novelistic narrative evokes both the chilling specter of sharks and the rich historical backdrop of Gilded Age America, an era when Americans were just beginning to swim in the ocean, and the Jersey shore, thanks to the railroads, was coming into its own as a playground for America’s new leisure class. Woven throughout is the theme of how these shark attacks metaphorically marked the end of an "innocent" ag
e in America when a ship was considered unsinkable and a shark, experts believed, hadn't the jaw strength to hurt a man.

Based on in-depth archival research into accounts of the attacks from 1916 newspapers and science journals and existing interviews with victims’ relatives as well as research and reporting on the social and cultural currents of the era and on what we have learned about sharks in the intervening decades, CLOSE TO SHORE paints vivid portraits of individuals ranging from tourists, local citizens and shore developers to scientists, shark experts and hunters. Capuzzo intersperses the spellbinding narrative with fascinating insights on shark behavior and on the evolving human-shark relationship, incorporating tales of shark attacks that occurred elsewhere and at other times to create a timeless account of our relationship with man’s last natural predator.

Michael Capuzzo tells the harrowing story of the real-life Jaws that helped inspire Peter Benchley's classic novel (and movie). Modern science now tells us that shark attacks are exceedingly rare and limited to just a few species. Yet they do occur, and one of the most terrifying episodes of fatal attacks occurred near the New Jersey shore in 1916, when a renegade great white shark went on a man-eating spree that left three adults and one boy dead. Capuzzo likens the shark's abnormal behavior to that of a person "who goes off the deep end and starts shooting." Whatever its motives, the shark captivated the public's imagination along the Eastern seaboard, devastated the resort economy, and even drew the attention of President Woodrow Wilson.

Close to Shore is a bit slow to get going and could have been a much shorter book. There is a fair amount of stage setting, and the first shark attack doesn't occur until about one-third of the way through the narrative. But Capuzzo does much with limited source material and includes lots of interesting asides on everything from the lore of sea monsters to the bathing-suit fashions of the day to nearly everything science knows about great whites, which, it turns out, is surprisingly little.

Alternating from the victims' perspectives to the shark's, Capuzzo's descriptions of the attacks are a blend of horrors and thrills: "Charles Bruder felt a slight vacuum tug in the motion of the sea, noted it as a passing current, the pull of a wave, the tickle of undertow. He could not have heard the faint, sucking rush of water not far beneath him. He couldn't have seen or heard what was hurtling from the murk at astonishing speed, jaws unhinging, widening, for the enormous first bite. It was the classic attack that no other creature in nature could make--a bomb from the depths." If this book were on any other subject, it would make for good beach reading. --John J. Miller