Winner of the Evelyn Richardson Award; chosen by The Globe and Mail as one of the Top 100 Books of 1998

"Brilliant storytellingÖ What makes The Living Beach such a fine book is Cameron's enthusiasm and exuberance" - The Globe and Mail

"Silver Donald Cameron is in peak form as he recounts sea stories mixed with science. His vivid charcter sketches - gathered from a North American beach odyssey - leap off the page." - Calgary Herald

"Once in an extremely blue moon, a writer finds a subject that perfectly suits his talents, passions, life and even the place he calls home. As this book eloquently proves, Cameron and the living beach were made for each other." - Halifax Sunday Herald

"I haven't been so charmed or learned so much from a book of nature writing in years." - Vancouver Sun

Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books:

In this part of the world, it is too easy to take for granted the beach, the shore­that eternal border between sea and land. Yet the beach can take on a sacred quality. For sailors and fishermen, it represents landfall, a safe haven after a long voyage. For the land-bound, it is a place for contemplation and celebration, a toehold on the trackless sea. It is the first place the earliest arrivals to this continent touched­where Europeans first left their footprints on the New World. Yet in The Living Beach Silver Donald Cameron takes this subject to a deeper level, asking, “What do humans mean to beaches?” It was an insightful question when he wrote the book in 1998. Over a decade later, as each year reveals anew the damage human interference has done to the ocean’s vast interconnected network of life, the subject has new significance. In the book, Cameron makes the case­skilfully, with passion but not melodrama or hectoring­that a beach is ultimately much more than a mere geographical location. “A beach isn’t a place, it’s a process,” he explains. “A beach is geological change, happening second-by-second, right before your eyes. And constant change within a stable process­that’s what life is. We spend our lives dancing with change.” In making that case, he teaches readers about the beach and its significance, and also about themselves.

It’s easy to be saccharine about the beach and the coastline­nothing is more representative of life in Atlantic Canada. Yet Cameron writes a book of rare strength by refusing to simply rehash the clichés. He brings a journalist’s probing nature, a yearning to understand what a beach really is and what it means­not just at an emotional level, but as a physical element of our world. He writes smoothly and skilfully, with minimum fat and maximum impact. Cameron shows how good this kind of writing can be, discovering a new dimension of the natural world and our place in it.

And with this book, Cameron challenges readers to look at something familiar in a new way. As one panellist put it: “[This is] an apparently simply written book about a complex subject, which makes one look at the whole structure of the seashore anew.” For a non-fiction writer, there can scarcely be higher praise.