Lovely and fortifying.As Mr. Finch points out, geologists estimate that Cape Cod will disappear in around 6,000 years.Until it goes, may there continue to be writers as good as Mr. Finch to commemorate it. -- Sam Sacks (Wall Street Journal) [Finch] is a keen and passionate observer.[he] artfully conveys what is, at heart, so stirring about the beach: how its beauty and magisterial power cause us to ponder the larger things in life and drive home our place in the universe. -- New York Times Book Review Finch is today's best, most perceptive Cape Cod writer in a line extending all the way back to Henry David Thoreau.

-- Steve Donoghue (Christian Science Monitor) A lovable book, full of high-leaping energy and charm. And Finch is great company--wonderfully informed, observant, and funny. He gives us his leisured and warm friendship; he gives us his humor and enthusiasm. What astounding sights he meets just by wandering! -- Annie Dillard A master stylist, Finch is both a naturalist and a philosopher.This beautiful book is to be savored in small bites by anyone yet to visit the Cape, and swallowed whole by those who love it as much as Finch does. -- Library Journal 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.Vivid and graceful reflections on water and wind, shifting sands, and the inevitability of change. -- starred review (Kirkus Reviews) In rich and subtle detail, his portraits of the beach capture its ever-shifting elements.

Finch draws lessons on the impermanence of life from this settlement built on sand, lessons that resonate with his evocative panorama of restive natural forces in an iconic setting. -- Publishers Weekly Every step of this fifty-year journey is a lesson, a poem, a hypothesis, a paean, a keen stroke in a vivid seascape, a treatise, a fresh verse in an ongoing elegy. The Outer Beach is one of the most moving books about Cape Cod ever written, and Robert Finch a genial, prickly, funny, exact, and generous companion. Talk about a beach book! -- Bill Roorbach, author of Temple Stream, Life Among Giants, and The Girl of the Lake With a scientist's clarity and a storyteller's wit, [Finch] tells of excursions taken over nearly half a century. His prose carries the tang of salt, the gossip of gulls, the hiss of wind and surf. Open this book and you can venture out with him in all weathers, all seasons--beachcombing, storm-chasing, birdwatching--all the while musing on the primordial dance between land and sea, and on the resilient creatures that live along the edge. -- Scott Russell Sanders, author of Dancing in Dreamtime.