This is beach geology 101 rendered in a pleasant and most fluent voice like the best of classic nature writing. The considerable information is meted out in a way that is easily absorbed. Before you reach the end, you are walking on the beach identifying runnels, plunging breakers, nail holes, swash and wrack lines and other exotica without running back to the book for help. You are no longer alarmed at black sand (it's sand of a different mineral base), you have new respect for the heaps of broken shells in your path. You understand how beaches are formed and where sand came from. You now know why a beach never looks the same from one day to the next. You can identify evidence of the mess caused by human intervention. This book will enhance your stay at the beach in ways that whiffle-light detective fiction never will. How to Read a North Carolina Beach: Bubble Holes, Barking Sands, and Rippled Runnels
This slim volume should be packed by any reader heading off to the
beach in North Carolina. The underlying theme is vintage Pilkey, the prophetic gadfly of beach development. He and his co-authors want us to understand that we are loving the beaches to death, like children who capture wild things. Beaches are dynamic, explains Pilkey, and all our efforts to stabiize them in some permanent state for our perpetual enjoyment are ultimately doomed. Thanks to the clear diagrams and excellent pictures, beach walkers and vicarious lovers of golden sands will better understand how this fragile system works. We need to read what Pilkey says, even if we don't want him to be right.
While the book explained a variety of topics relating to NC beaches, I found the writing to be of a rather poor quality. Perhaps this was a result of having three authors involved. Despite this, I did find the answers to several beach related questions and I appreciate the authors' efforts.
I was also somewhat worried that a person who has not yet been to a NC beach may have read this book and assumed that our beaches are all disgustingly overbuilt, polluted, and unnatural. Perhaps I'm just lucky in having only visited the more pristine parts of our more pristine beaches, but a lot of the environmental "sky-is-falling" sections seemed exaggerated. I appreciate the authors' obvious desire to protect this important ecosystem for future generations, but I'm not convinced that scaring people away is the way to do that.
The author has included information on the topics shown in the title which were interesting and informative however, it is clear that the author is anti-development at the beach and this message comes though time and time again. With this much propaganda against building on the coastline I think the book should have been free. - Nature - Outer Banks - North Carolina'
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