COMMON GROUND: A Naturalist’s Cape Cod ...

COMMON GROUND: A Naturalist’s Cape Cod by Robert Finch (Norton: $10.95; 142 pp.). Finch joins the distinguished line of writers inspired by the oddly curved Cape Cod peninsula. Despite the encroachments of developers, the Cape still boasts numerous wild areas. Finch wanders the beaches, marshes and second-growth forests, reflecting on untamed nature and its importance in an increasingly overcrowded world: “I go to a zoo to observe animals, but I go to wilderness to enter a world not mine, where my standards do not apply, where imagination runs in the fur and the flesh and calls to me in a language I cannot decipher but which is nonetheless nourishing and irresistible.”