Author: Orrin H Pilkey and J Andrew G Cooper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
Note that this book has a lot of interesting and disturbing photographs illustrating the author's case. I don't have permission to post any of those, though I wish I did. However, I have substituted two images tagged as free to re-use on Google to illustrate the same concepts. To substitute for one related to sand (or beach) mining which I would have liked to share, please take a look at this website. To substitute for the images showing the difference between a beach which is driven on and one which is not, check out this page, in particular the images at middle right (which looks just like the one used in the book) and the one at bottom left.
This book, which is available from November 2014, isn't fiction. It's our future. In a no-nonsense, if slightly dry tone, this densely-packed book takes you through the facts of what we are, as a civilization, doing to our beaches through mismanagement, horrifying pollution, and our appalling dependence upon oil.
It takes a few pages to get to the meat. There are several pages of drawings before the foreword, three pages of that, and then five pages of preface, all of which I skipped as I routinely do with prologues, etc. This message is too important to delay. When you have a story to tell that's this powerful, preamble just hobbles it.
The story of our beaches is rich with startling images. It's tempting to use the cliché that it's "lavishly illustrated", but the images, while beautifully photographed are actually horrific because of what they show. They reveal, in the most graphic way, how we are hanging, drawing and quartering our beaches - the locations so many of us claim to love the most.
This is an advance review copy, and hopefully odds and ends will be, unlike our beaches, taken care of before this finally gets published, but the page numbering was sadly off in Adobe Reader. The cover is numbered as page 236, and some other pages are numbered seemingly randomly. Indeed, changing pages by typing a new page number into the bottom of the screen seemed to confuse Adobe Reader completely. I don't know why that is, but it's definitely another indictment of ebooks!
I was contacted by a representative of Duke University Press on this aspect of my review, all but demanding that I delete these comments, but that's not how this blog works. Publishers don't get to tell me what to blog or how to blog, and if that means I get no more review books from that publisher, then that's too bad. My comments stand because we're no longer in the era of literal galley proofs where metal type has to be set by hand and laboriously changed out to correct errors. We're in the era of word processing, desktop publishing, WYSIWIG, spell-checkers and grammar checkers, and there is no longer any excuse for sub-standard "proofs". I will, however, post the comments I got from Duke University press verbatim below
I would very much appreciate it if you would remove your criticisms of the book's design until you can see a final copy. There will be a properly formatted e-book available by the end of the year and a print book in November. The "filler pages" you refer to in your review are standard paper book formatting in order to fit required cataloging information.
Frankly I'm not sure what that last sentence means. There's a difference between pages which contain cataloguing and publication information (i.e. not filler pages), and having several pages of unnecessary drawings (filler pages), but if I see this as a print book somehwere this coming November, I will revisit this review and comment on it again then. Until then, my original comment (pagraph below) still stands and I still recommend this book.
There are several filler pages at the beginning of the book which I felt were unnecessary. This book is about a very serious environmental concern, and to me it detracts from that when we add unnecessary pages, each of which will use up part of a tree in the print version. I felt that this sent the wrong message, but maybe that's just me!.
The content of the book is what really won the day for me. The chapters come thick and fast, every one of them with a indictment of our insanity when it comes to how we treat our beaches. People agonize over rain-forest and wilderness, but beaches, for some reason, are ignored, undervalued, and treated like some vulgar relative.
In rapid succession, the stupidity of beach mining is exposed, along with the insanity of building houses upon sand, the failure of so-called 'beach replenishment', algal blooms, the disgusting trashing of beaches from a variety of sources, including the beach tourists who use those same beaches for recreation, the potential for horrific disease inherent in the misuse of beaches, the abusive driving on beaches of both 'official' and unofficial vehicles, and finally with the extensive and unforgivable oil and tar pollution.
Each chapter is exhaustively documented and supported by research as the appendices detail, and some of the information is as bizarre as it is disturbing. Did you know, for example, that there's an international trade in beach sand? That beach users have died from causes as disparate as flesh-eating bacterial infection and being run-over by a police SUV? That sea walls aimed at preventing beach erosion actually exacerbate it? That debris from the 2004 "St Stephen's tsunami" is still washing up on beaches across the Pacific, and right behind it is debris from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that took out a Japanese nuclear reactors - a disaster which itself was caused by poor waterfront management and thoughtless construction?
The underlying message, just like the underlying sand, is that beaches are not the static environment we encounter when we go out there on a weekend or once a year on vacation. We think of the sea as restless, and ever in motion, yet we never see the shoreline in the same way. Why not? Beaches are vital and dynamic, and nothing we can do is ever going to change that, or stop it, or overcome it. You cannot control a beach any more than you can really control the activities of beach-goers, and any hard management scheme is doomed to fail. The only thing which works is the realization and appreciation of the value of the beach, and throwing all our efforts into protecting the natural ebb and flow, rather than foolishly trying to make it come to heel.
Pilkey and Cooper have done us all a huge service in drawing this to our attention and I recommend this book.
Update:
Article in NYT on disappearing beaches.
