Adam Nicolson explores the marine life inhabiting seashore rock pools with a scientist\u2019s curiosity and a poet\u2019s wonder in this beautifully illustrated book.<\/span><\/p>\nThe sea is not made of water. Creatures are\u00a0<\/span>its genes. Look down as you crouch over the\u00a0<\/span>shallows and you will find a periwinkle or\u00a0<\/span>a prawn, a claw-displaying crab or a cluster\u00a0<\/span>of anemones ready to meet you. No need for\u00a0<\/span>binoculars or special stalking skills: go to the\u00a0<\/span>rocks and the living will say hello.<\/span><\/p>\nInside 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\u2015the ebb and flow of the tide, the steady forward propulsion of the passage of time, and the tiny lifetimes of the rock pool\u2019s creatures, all of which coalesce into the grand narrative of evolution.<\/p>\n
In\u00a0Life Between the Tides<\/span>, Adam Nicolson investigates one of the most revelatory habitats on earth. Under his microscope, we see a prawn\u2019s head become a medieval helmet and a group of \u201cwinkles\u201d 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 \u201cwith scientific rigor and a poet\u2019s sense of wonder\u201d (The American Scholar<\/span>), the world of the rock pools is infinite and as intricate as our own.<\/p>\nAs 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\u2015no one can escape the pull of the sea. We meet Virginia Woolf and her\u00a0Waves<\/span>; a young T. S. Eliot peering into his own rock pool in Massachusetts; even Nicolson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\nEverything is within the rock pools, where you can look beyond your own reflection and find the miraculous an inch beneath your nose. \u201cThe soul wants to be wet,\u201d Heraclitus said in Ephesus twenty-five hundred years ago. This marvelous book demonstrates why it is so.<\/p>\n
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