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Chargement... De zee is niet van water leven tussen de getijden (édition 2022)par Adam Nicolson, Nico Groen (Traducteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreLife Between the Tides par Adam Nicolson
Books Read in 2021 (3,883) Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. The author built three tidepools in western Scotland and studied the plants and animals that occupied them. This is a natural history book, but although it starts in the expected way describing prawns and green crabs, it expands to describe the history of the discovery of the origin of the tides, the human history of western Scotland, the philosophy of Heraclitus, Martin Heidegger, and more. He sometimes writes a little elliptically. ====== Note that my copy of this book is not titled this way. It's just Life Between the Tides. I really liked large parts of this, about the creatures living in tidal areas of the southwestern Scotland shore, and about the author’s delight in observing them in the wild and within three roughly-made tidal pools he constructed. But there were other chunks of the book with history, religion, and philosophy that didn’t resonate with me. I wanted to love this book! The marine biology presented in the book was fascinating, and I appreciated many of the ventures into history and philosophy. However, the author ventured into so many other areas (fairy mythology, for example) that the book seemed to lose focus. I listened to the audio version of the book, so i was unable to view the artwork. On the plus side, the reader of the audio-book was excellent. The book begins with the author building a tidal pool an investigating the marine life that he finds in it, which I found fascinating. Then he discusses tides and geology, which I also found interesting, then he veers off into the human history of the people in the area, and suddenly he's talking about poverty, clans, fairies, then philosophy, then suddenly he comes back and builds another pool. I found this progression bewildering at first, then annoying, and ultimately disappointing. I feel like the third section really belongs in another book, and it's not the one I thought I was reading.
The opening section of this book is called Animals and we leap from sand hopper to winkle to prawn, understanding the complex interconnectedness of these underexamined lives, learning a new and perspective-altering fact on every page. Then, all of a sudden, there's a chapter on the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. It's a segment of exquisite beauty, a bravura act of writing that seems not only to provide a model for the rest of this book, but changes the way you understand the whole dizzying Nicolson oeuvre. This is a writer who has moved from memoir to literary criticism to nature writing via The Mighty Dead, one of the best books on Homer ever written. In his chapter on Heraclitus, Nicolson reads a rock pool through the work of the great philosopher, bringing to the crucible of tidal life "a systemic understanding whose wholeness relies on its union of opposites". We begin to understand that the thread that links Nicolson's books is precisely this – a philosopher's wish to provide a way of comprehending the place of the individual in a vast and shifting world, the quest for a good life, the search for new answers to old questions. ... The real journey of The Sea Is Not Made of Water occurs in its second and third parts, though. We come to recognise that the chapters on rock pools have only been a rehearsal, a study for what is to come. From the Lilliputian intimacy of the rock pool we spool out to chapters on the tides and the formation of rocks – vast in space and time, vertiginous in their scope and ambition. The last part of the book provides a history of the humans who inhabited this wild and rocky Scottish shore from pre-history to the present, with Nicolson applying the same sympathetic scientific curiosity to these lives that he gave to the winkles. "Life is tidal, full of loss and arrival, a thing that makes and ebbs," he writes at one point, and this is what we take away from the book – that we are all in rock pools, knitted within complex systems. We are part of nature, not separate from it. Here's an idea: the best books are never only, or even mainly, about the subject they claim to be about. The novelist John Barth said something like this when asked what kept people turning pages. "The question 'Who am I?' is what ultimately motivates the reader," he said. The greatest literature – and this unique and terribly moving title is great literature indeed – reaches beyond itself to speak to us of the most profound and essential things. Spending time in Nicolson's rock pool will change your life and the way you view the lives of others. Prix et récompensesDistinctions
Nature.
Science.
Nonfiction.
Inside each rockpool, 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 its 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 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, the world of the rockpools 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. We meet Virginia Woolf and her Waves; a young T. S. Eliot peering into his own rockpool in Massachusetts. And, of course, scientists populate the pages; not only their discoveries, but also their doubts and errors, their moments of quiet observation and their realizations. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)577.699Natural sciences and mathematics Life Sciences, Biology Ecology Aquatic ecology, Freshwater ecology Saltwater wetland and seashore ecology Seashore ecologyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Then he looks more widely at tides, at waves, at geology. He looks at the philosophical ideas of Heraclitus. He discusses the bitter and harsh social history of Argyllshire. All of this is interesting, and interestingly accounted for.
In the end, I wasn't convinced this book hung together. I was glad to have read it, but remained unconvinced I knew what was at its heart, beyond the captivating contents of the rockpools. ( )