On a Barge in France

Buy a 90-year-old Dutch canal barge and cruise the canals and rivers of France. Eat snails. Drink Burgundy. Sounds like a retirement dream. Sometimes. In On a Barge in France Harvey Schwartz tells of the four years he and his wife, Sandra Hamilton, spent on Hoop Doet Leven on the French waterways. Each chapter presents a vignette of French country life and life in the unique linear village of international bargees traveling extremely slowly through the most beautiful, historic and mind boggling areas of France.

Harvey Schwartz is a retired Boston civil rights attorney. Although he argued two cases before the United States Supreme Court, he is perhaps best known in Massachusetts for successfully overturning the state’s ban on tattooing. He argued that tattoos are art and that as artistic speech, the right to tattoo is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. As a reward, he was declared the Massachusetts Tattoo Artists Association Mass Ink Man of the Year. As punishment, however, both his sons’ are encrusted with tattoos. In 2011, Mr. Schwartz and his wife, Sandra Hamilton, purchased Hoop Doet Leven, a 21 meter (70 foot) former commercial canal barge built in the Netherlands in 1926. They lived on Hoop Doet Leven in France for twenty months and have spent every summer since then cruising the French canals and rivers, primarily in northeastern and central France. Mr. Schwartz also wrote a novel, The Reluctant Terrorist, presenting a plausibly terrifying depiction of events similar to the Holocaust happening in the United States. That book is available from Amazon in paper and electronically. When not in France, Harvey and Sandra live in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He operates Marshview Boatworks, building small wood rowing and paddling boats. They maintain a blog about their travels at www.onabargeinfrance.com.