Death of a Hornet: And Other Cape Cod Essays - Hardcover

Finch, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582430497 ISBN 13: 9781582430492

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2000

Synopsis

Essays on the natural history of the Cape Cod region document changes in the environment, and in the author's life.

About this title

Review:

Cape Cod, Massachusetts, like every other place, is but a small corner of the planet. Yet it contains multitudes, as the nature writer and editor Robert Finch demonstrates in this lively set of essays. In the title piece, which opens the book, he muses on a fellow occupant of his study, a spider that, one day, does in a yellow hornet that has incautiously wandered into her web. There is no cruelty in the spider's act, Finch notes, only a quiet affirmation of the unsentimental ways of nature, in which death follows and even presupposes life. Other essays consider the unhappy fortunes of a beached whale, one that evidently had not found enough to eat at a crucial stage in its growth; the comings and goings of migratory birds and bats; the movement of sand dunes; the falling of autumn leaves; and the eternal power of the ocean. In limning the landscapes of Cape Cod, shaped by humans as much as by the sea, Finch shows that one need not wander into the wilderness to find nature in abundance; his gentle reflections on the small details of daily life are models of compression and careful observation.

Although some of the essays are tinged with melancholy--as befits any consideration of matters of life and death, and of the passage of the years--they collectively celebrate a place that has captured the hearts of many, and will long do so. Or, as Finch writes, "How lucky are we who live in proximity to such a landscape, that has such easy powers to lift us out of our narrow lives and self-made blinders, and so seduce us into seeing who we really are!" --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Robert Finch has been a year-round Cape Cod resident since 1971. His other books include Common Ground, The Primal Place, Outlands, and The Cape Itself, as well as The Norton Book of Nature Writing, which he co-edited. Finch won the Boston Public Library New England Literary Lights Award in 1999. He lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1582430497
• ISBN 13: 9781582430492
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240