For the past decade award winning science writer William Sargent has been exploring the effects of coastal erosion on Plum Island in Northern Massachusetts. For most of that time people had been making poor decisions based on faulty science.

Things started to change when a group of Woods Hole scientists produced the first piece of solid science about the island.

Armed with that understanding, residents took two steps forward to slow erosion until politics drove them three steps backwards in 2018. This book chronicles that tumultuous year.