Book Review: “The New Beachcomber’s Guide to Seashore Life of California: Completely Revised and Expanded” By J. Duane Sept
Author note: Book reviews on this site are designed to give the reader a general idea of a book, its perceived purpose, and its success in accomplishing those purposes.
The New Beachcomber’s Guide to Seashore Life of California: Completely Revised and Expanded by J. Duane Sept is a field guide published in 2023 by Harbour Publishing ^(https://www.blogquicker.com/goto/https://harbourpublishing.com), where you can purchase the book. Field guides are designed to inform the reader about animal or plant life and aid in identification. In this book, Sept focuses on the seashore life of the California coast, seeking to expose new beachcombers and tidepoolers to what kinds of life they might encounter. Overall, it does an incredible job at this task, functioning as a reference book instead of a read-it-straight-through book. In this review, we’ll dive into some of the common goals field guides try to accomplish and how well the New Beachcomber’s Guide does so.
Information: 9/10
Field guides are about providing information to the reader, and New Beachcomber’s Guide doesn’t fall short. It includes profiles of over 270 intertidal animals found along the California coast, including physical description, range, habitat, size, and behavior notes. Overall, the information is very thorough and includes a similar species section in many profiles that lists visually similar animals that might be confused. But unlike other field guides, it doesn’t point out distinguishing field marks to differentiate between species. I also wish more notes on the behavior of the animals were included, but because this book is a field guide, this omission makes sense. The book is extensive, not exhaustive, and experts will likely find many species in their field of study omitted (I noticed many species of nudibranchs that weren’t included).
Images: 10/10
The images in this book are stunning and plentiful. They adequately show the field of marks of animals to aid in ID and also make the book interesting to flip through. It has adopted the method of newer field guides that rely more heavily on photographs and less on text descriptions. It’s printed with beautiful coated paper, making for vivid colors.
Readability and Format: 8/10
No one is going to sit down and read straight through New Beachcomber’s Guide. This isn’t what it’s meant for, and the information is far too choppy to do so. But for a field guide, New Beachcomber’s Guide is rather readable. The format is easy to follow, visually clear, and broken into bite-sized sections. It’s easy to tell where the information on one animal ends and another begins. It does, however, have a barrier to use in terms. A truly “new” beachcomber will be turning to the glossary frequently to look up unfamiliar scientific words. Additionally, the reader is expected to know at least some about these animals and be able to sort animals into major groups. There isn’t a lot of over-arching information about categories of animals— just a brief couple of paragraphs at the beginning of each section. and then on to the species profiles. If you don’t know about the categories of animals (at about the class level), you aren’t going to learn about them as a whole from this book.
Portability: 5/10
Some people like to take their field guides into… well… the field. I personally prefer to take photos and find IDs later, but I will touch on portability here. This book is 6×9 and fairly heavy at over 400 pages. It will barely fit in a small sling bag; you’ll probably need a backpack to take this book along with you. But I’ll take more information and beautiful images over a smaller book any day.
Overall Usefulness: 9/10
The New Beachcomber’s Guide is incredibly useful and a great purchase for any tidepoolers, experienced or newbie. The narrow range makes identifying animals easier, and the photographs further aid in this. I have identified many unfamiliar animals using this book and spent hours skimming through the pages, learning about the habitat or habits of familiar animals and discovering new ones. If you’d like to purchase the book, you can do so here ^(https://www.blogquicker.com/goto/https://www.amazon.com/Beachcombers-Guide-Seashore-Life-California/dp/1990776078/ref=asc_df_1990776078/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=693587283996&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=951324014199560195&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1012944&hvtargid=pla-1741670412673&psc=1&mcid=88927e41e6933be5938b627d5c41b8e3).
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