Walking the wrack line

"Barbara Hurd continues to give nature writing a human dimension by examining what washes ashore, from the angel wing shells to broken oars." "Each chapter starts with close attention to an object - a fragment of a pelican eggshell, or perhaps a jellyfish - but then widens into larger concerns: the persistence of habits, desire, disappointments, the lie of the perfectly preserved, the pleasures of aversions, transformations, and a phenomenon from physics known as the strange attractor."--Jacket.