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THE OUTER BEACH

Name: THE OUTER BEACH
Author: Robert Finch
ISBN: 978-0-393-08130-5

A THOUSAND-MILE WALK ON CAPE COD'S ATLANTIC SHORE

by Robert Finch ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 9, 2017

Vivid and graceful reflections on water and wind, shifting sands, and the inevitability of change.

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Lyrical reflections, natural history, and nuggets of wisdom inspired by walks at the shore.

In 40 years of walking along Cape Cod’s Outer Beach, Finch (Cape Cod Notebook 2, 2016, etc.) estimates that he has covered 1,000 miles, rambles that have informed nine previous books. In his latest collection, he chronicles his beach walking from south to north along the Cape’s 40-mile stretch of glacial bluffs, barrier beach, and islands. 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. One night, walking through fog, he could barely see the surf but suddenly smelled the ocean, “rich, salt spiced, redolent of fecundity and decay.” Under moonlight, the waves “came in silhouette, low black forms, like great fish swirling in on the moon-crusted surface of the sea.” Like the surfers he enjoys watching, Finch has learned to read waves, “each with its own distinct shape, height, alignment, speed, curl.” Each wave “speaks its own watery sentence, which the surfer has to parse.” The author reflects often on change and time. “The more mobile we become,” he suggests, “the more immobile we demand nature to be.” But the shore is in constant, repetitive flux: “The Cape’s outer shores are a solid metaphor for the river of time, into which we can step only once.” Finch once brought a distraught friend to the shore, hoping to help him discover “the need to adapt continually to change, always to be watching for undertows and rogue waves, to dance nimbly along its edges.” His friend returned to the solidity of hills; Finch found “solace and reassurance from the beach.” Even without the possible rise in sea level because of climate change, scientists estimate that the Cape will be eroded in 6,000 years. Nature, Finch knows, is more powerful than human intervention, and it is this power than enthralls him.

Vivid and graceful reflections on water and wind, shifting sands, and the inevitability of change.

Pub Date: May 9, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-393-08130-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)