Beyond the Outer Shores

Library Bookwatch, Dec, 2004

Beyond The Outer Shores

Eric Enno Tamm

Four Walls Eight Windows

39 West 14th Street, #503, NY, NY 10011

1568682986 $26.00 www.4w8w.com

Few folks know the name of Ed Ricketts, but he was a pioneering ecologist who inspired notables John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell alike, and has long deserved his own biography. Eric Enno Tamm has solved this gap in detail with Beyond The Outer Shores, a biography of the man who served as the 'renaissance man of Cannery Row', fostering a friendship which led Steinbeck to integrate an ecological perspective into his early works--and to reject the notion of a human-centered universe. Ricketts was no insider in his industry: he was an academic outcast who was at once a beach bum, a philanderer, and an ecologist whose early warnings about over-fishing in California and Alaska fell on deaf ears in the 1930s. A pioneering biographial work covers his long-unsung achievements.