Life Between the Tides Life Between the Tides

Publisher Description

Adam Nicolson explores the marine life inhabiting seashore rockpools with a scientist’s curiosity and a poet’s wonder in this beautifully illustrated book.

The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes. Look down as you crouch over the shallows and you will find a periwinkle or a prawn, a claw-displaying crab or a cluster of anemones ready to meet you. No need for binoculars or special stalking skills: go to the rocks and the living will say hello.

Inside each rock pool tucked into one of the infinite crevices of the tidal coastline lies a rippling, silent, unknowable universe. Below the stillness of the surface course different currents of endless motion—the ebb and flow of the tide, the steady forward propulsion of the passage of time, and the tiny lifetimes of the rock pool’s creatures, all of which coalesce into the grand narrative of evolution.

In Life Between the Tides, Adam Nicolson investigates one of the most revelatory habitats on earth. Under his microscope, we see a prawn’s head become a medieval helmet and a group of “winkles” transform into a Dickensian social scene, with mollusks munching on Stilton and glancing at their pocket watches. Or, rather, is a winkle more like Achilles, an ancient hero, throwing himself toward death for the sake of glory? For Nicolson, who writes “with scientific rigor and a poet’s sense of wonder” (The American Scholar), the world of the rock pools is infinite and as intricate as our own.

As Nicolson journeys between the tides, both in the pools he builds along the coast of Scotland and through the timeline of scientific discovery, he is accompanied by great thinkers—no one can escape the pull of the sea. We meet Virginia Woolf and her Waves; a young T. S. Eliot peering into his own rock pool in Massachusetts; even Nicolson’s father-in-law, a classical scholar who would hunt for amethysts along the shoreline, his mind on Heraclitus and the other philosophers of ancient Greece. And, of course, scientists populate the pages; not only their discoveries, but also their doubts and errors, their moments of quiet observation and their thrilling realizations.

Everything is within the rock pools, where you can look beyond your own reflection and find the miraculous an inch beneath your nose. “The soul wants to be wet,” Heraclitus said in Ephesus twenty-five hundred years ago. This marvelous book demonstrates why it is so.

Includes Color and Black-and-White Photographs

GENRE
Science & Nature
RELEASED
2022
February 22
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
421
Pages
PUBLISHER
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
SELLER
Macmillan
SIZE
654.5
MB
Birds by the Shore Birds by the Shore
2019
The Book of Barely Imagined Beings The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
2013
The Flight of the Iguana The Flight of the Iguana
2012
The View from Lazy Point The View from Lazy Point
2011
Arctic Dreams Arctic Dreams
2024
Life Life
1998
The Odyssey The Odyssey
2015
Why Homer Matters Why Homer Matters
2014
Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History
2015
God's Secretaries God's Secretaries
2009
The Iliad The Iliad
2015
The Seabird's Cry The Seabird's Cry
2018
An Immense World An Immense World
2022
North Woods North Woods
2023
The Hunter The Hunter
2024
Cloud Cuckoo Land Cloud Cuckoo Land
2021
Klara and the Sun: A GMA Book Club Pick Klara and the Sun: A GMA Book Club Pick
2021
James (Pulitzer Prize Winner) James (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
2024