Review by Choice Review
Highly acclaimed author Nicolson, whose previous works include Why Homer Matters (CH, Jun'15, 52-5175), has written an utterly captivating saga of life and death, commensalism and competition, and fragility and endurance, all emanating from his exquisitely detailed observations of tidal pools and their inhabitants. The pools examined are of his own construction in three different natural settings that reveal an astonishing diversity of life. Nicolson's descriptions of the "oscillating manifestation" of tidal communities readily evoke the sound of surf and smell of seaweed. His gifted storytelling is not limited to those pools, however. Interactions of human culture and particular human societies with the sea, especially the nearshore waters, have generated folklore and myths that Nicolson features throughout the book, along with fascinating historical accounts of the people who first inhabited the western region of Scotland and struggled to sustain a livelihood along that coast. The bibliography ranges from biology to philosophy, anthropology to poetry, archaeology to literature, and Darwin to rocks, maps, and guidebooks. Nicolson provides 328 endnotes referencing particular papers and primary sources. Dozens of drawings, photographs, and other illustrations further enliven the text. This author's seamless interweaving of physics, ecology, and geoscience with sociology, military history, and religious belief offers a satisfying read for anyone. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --Alison Scott Ricker, Oberlin College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
If you intend to share wonderment over a place of complex, ever-in-flux beauty, your language had best be as dynamic as what you're seeking to celebrate. In the mode of Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea, distinguished British writer Nicolson (The Seabird's Cry, 2018) succeeds gloriously in conveying the marvels of a stretch of Scottish tidal coast, mixing history, science, and precise descriptions bright with inventive metaphors and profound revelations. Not content to merely observe, Nicolson plunges into slime, "slutch," and "slither-gloop" in pursuit of such "hidden" creatures as the sandhopper, a tiny crustacean, and digs rock pools (with permission) to create little tide-buffeted ecosystems. As he scrutinizes prawns, each as "intricate as a space station," periwinkles, anemones, crabs (whose competition for sex he declares "Shakespearean"), and the intricately symbiotic relationships that keep edge-of-the-sea life in balance, Nicolson pursues his key theme of how closely related we are to all of Earth's animals. He finds evidence of these connections in the numerous traits we share with other species, from memory to fear, "recognizing the continuities between animal and human consciousness." Nicolson also chronicles human life on this precarious land, delving into myths, rituals, clans, poverty, and war, and portraying scientists who zealously studied this realm of oceanic churn. Ultimately and inevitably, Nicolson explains how our fossil-fuel habit threatens the grand complexity of life he so vibrantly evokes.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ondaatje Prize winner Nicolson studies the life that teems inside tide pools in this evocative meditation (after The Seabird's Cry). "Creatures" are the ocean's "genes," he writes, and sheds light on the life that lives along the coast, among them the common prawn, "minuscule adventurers, at home in this world, with pitch-perfect neutral buoyancy, floating in their stillness neither up nor down" and whose limbs serve "different functions--manducatory, for chewing, ambulatory, for walking, natatory, for swimming." There's a fascinating section on "the dramas of crab life," as Nicolson baits the creatures with bacon and watches males "fight hard over access to females." A chapter on vibrant, many-colored anemones references a young T.S. Eliot, whose family spent summers near Gloucester, Mass., where the poet saw "a sea anemone for the first time," an event that influenced Eliot's writing, Nicolson suggests. The author's wonder is infectious, and he makes a convincing case that to better understand the sea, people must pay more attention: "Go to the rocks and the living will say hello." As poetic as it is enlightening, this is tough to put down. Illus. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, the Zoë Pagnamenta Agency. (Feb.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A journey into the wonderment of a tidal inlet. Memoirist, historian, and nature writer Nicolson brings capacious erudition and acute sensitivity to his intimate investigation of the ebb, the flow, and the teeming variety of life in tidal pools. Like William Blake, who saw the world in a grain of sand, Nicolson sees the universe, and humans' meaning within it, in that liminal, ever changing habitat. The shore, he writes, quoting poet Seamus Heaney, "is where 'things overflow the brim of the usual,' and that brim is at the heart of this book." Along the coast of Scotland, Nicolson created his own tidal pool by digging through Jurassic rock that had been buried for 200 million years. "If tides are our twice-daily connection to the universe," he writes, "the rocks are our ever-present library of time." Soon the pool became home to sandhoppers, prawns, winkles, crabs, anemone, and more--each with its particular biology and behavior, affording the author "repeated chances of ecstatic encounter." Nicolson augments his own lucid observations with those of naturalists, biologists, and zoologists from ancient times to the present, and he enlarges his purview to include Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Herbert Spencer, and Heidegger, among others, for insight into how "the human, the planetary and the animal all interact" in watery topography. Like Virginia Woolf, Nicolson is "entranced by liquidity, which could embody realities that solids could scarcely address." The shore, he writes, "is filled with infinite regressions," from the swelling ocean "into the microscopic." Water inspires deeply philosophical reflection. Above all, the author seeks to illuminate his own place in space and time. "The coexistence with the things of the pool, the being-with them, a total co-presence with them, came to seem like a way of establishing my own being in the world," he writes. To be-with is the only way to be." Illustrated with photographs and delicate drawings, this book is a marvel. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
