The Outer Beach

The author chose John Keats' remark, 'Description is always bad,' as an epigraph for the book, but that comment surely does not apply to the precision and sheer loveliness of Finch's prose...Vivid and graceful reflections on water and wind, shifting sands, and the inevitability of change. -- starred review - Kirkus Reviews A lovable book, full of high-leaping energy and charm. And Finch is great company-wonderfully informed, observant, and funny. He gives us his leisured and warm friendship; he gives us his humor and enthusiasm. What astounding sights he meets just by wandering! -- Annie Dillard In rich and subtle detail, his portraits of the beach capture its ever-shifting elements...Finch draws lessons on the impermanence of life from this settlement built on sand, lessons that resonate with his evocative panorama of restive natural forces in an iconic setting. -- Publishers Weekly Every step of this fifty-year journey is a lesson, a poem, a hypothesis, a paean, a keen stroke in a vivid seascape, a treatise, a fresh verse in an ongoing elegy. The Outer Beach is one of the most moving books about Cape Cod ever written, and Robert Finch a genial, prickly, funny, exact, and generous companion. Talk about a beach book! -- Bill Roorbach, author of Temple Stream, Life Among Giants, and The Girl of the Lake With a scientist's clarity and a storyteller's wit, [Finch] tells of excursions taken over nearly half a century... His prose carries the tang of salt, the gossip of gulls, the hiss of wind and surf. Open this book and you can venture out with him in all weathers, all seasons-beachcombing, storm-chasing, birdwatching-all the while musing on the primordial dance between land and sea, and on the resilient creatures that live along the edge. -- Scott Russell Sanders, author of Dancing in Dreamtime The Hopi people have a term-tuwanasaapi-that translated as 'place where you belong.' These incisive essays...document in the sterling prose that is the landmark of Finch's writing... In an age of globalization-the loss of place and contact with the natural world due in part to the expanding dependence on the cyber world-we need books like this. -- John Hanson Mitchell, author of Ceremonial Time and editor of the former Sanctuary magazine The real thing. -- Edward Hoagland, author of In the Country of the Blind