This book is about an eight-mile barrier island on the Atlantic coast. It faces due south, on the same latitude as Los Angeles, California. The island enjoys a mild climate and its oceanfront consists entirely of sandy beach. It wasn’t an island until 1934 when it was severed from the mainland by the construction of a section of the Intracoastal Waterway. What is now Ocean Isle, slept in solitude for hundreds of years, disturbed only by a visit in 1791 of George Washington on his Southern Tour and by the U.S. Coast Guard’s mounted sailors who patrolled the island’s beach in WWll. In the 1920s, the long repose ended with an awakening by prohibition and the jazz age. Young flappers expended energy dancing the Charleston and imbibing bootlegged gin in Ocean Isle’s first commercial structure, a honky-tonk on the island’s welcoming beach.