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Rating: 
Summary: "What's Up, Doc?"
Review: Ed Ricketts "Doc" ever heard of him? Me neither, but after roaring through first time author, Eric Enno Tamm's portrait of the fraternal relationship between America's beloved John Steinbeck and this shadowy almost mythological figure I can't help but feel the loss of his violent and tragic passing more than half a century ago. It's often said that "no man is an island" and nowhere is this more true than in the case of writers. Ed Ricketts was to John Steinbeck (and Joseph Campbell) what Neal Cassidy was to Jack Kerouac. If America's legendary literary tradition is to endure we need not only more great writers and their muses but books like Tamm's "BEYOND THE OUTER SHORES" to memorialize their friendships.
Rating:
Summary: "What's Up, Doc?"
Review: Ed Ricketts "Doc" ever heard of him? Me neither, but after roaring through first time author, Eric Enno Tamm's portrait of the fraternal relationship between America's beloved John Steinbeck and this shadowy almost mythological figure I can't help but feel the loss of his violent and tragic passing more than half a century ago. It's often said that "no man is an island" and nowhere is this more true than in the case of writers. Ed Ricketts was to John Steinbeck (and Joseph Campbell) what Neal Cassidy was to Jack Kerouac. If America's legendary literary tradition is to endure we need not only more great writers and their muses but books like Tamm's "BEYOND THE OUTER SHORES" to memorialize their friendships.
Rating:
Summary: A pioneering biographial work
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Grateful to Eric Tamm
Review: I got to know "Doc" Ricketts when I was about 15. In 10th-grade English, we had read "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Of Mice and Men," and I greatly enjoyed both. My English teacher knew not only of my enthusiasm for Steinbeck, but also my penchant for standing knee-deep in ponds collecting invertebrate animals. She suggested I might like to read "Cannery Row" on my own. I did, and became a convicted Steinbeck fan.
I could not have known then, of course, that one day I'd not only get a doctorate in zoology but also have a daughter who'd earn a degree in marine science. Nor could I have imagined that she and I would make a pilgrimage to Monterey and Cannery Row together, and perform together in a college production of "The Grapes of Wrath."
"Doc" was never far from my mind in the years since 1965. But aside from what little we learned on our brief visit to Monterey, I still knew Ed Ricketts as little more than Doc: a collector, proprietor of a biological supply company, and wanna-be scientist. (Remember Doc's futile effort to write a scientific treatise on an octopus.)
Until now. I read a review of "Beyond the Outer Shores" in "Nature," promptly booted up Amazon.com, and ordered it to give to my daughter this Christmas -- along with Steinbeck and Ricketts' "Sea of Cortez" and Ricketts' "Between Pacific Tides." I couldn't resist dipping into "Outer Shores" the moment it arrived, and once I did, I couldn't stop until I reached the back cover. Now I've ordered another set of this Ricketts-Steinbeck-Tamm trilogy for my own library.
Tamm elevates Ed Ricketts far beyond the Steinbeck caricature. It's an enlightening look at how close the Ricketts-Steinbeck friendship and mutual admiration was, and a surprising revelation of Ricketts' friendship with another admired scholar, Joseph Campbell. But most importantly, it fleshes out my image of Ricketts as a serious scholar, philosophical thinker, and pioneering marine ecologist. I regret only that I didn't have this book a few months earlier, when my wife and I visited Vancouver Island this summer. We did not get to the outer coast, but only the stretch between Nanaimo and Victoria. Having "Beyond the Outer Shores" in hand would have changed my itinerary and made another pilgrimage of it.
On many levels from ecology and conservation to mythology and Tao, I will be proud to give this to my daughter this Christmas. It's so much more than a biography; it's an inspiration, an intellectual feast, and an invitation to so many other domains of human thought and feeling. I really appreciate both the effort and story-telling skill that Eric Tamm put into this terrific intellectual biography.
Rating:
Summary: This Doc Rocks
Review: Tamm does an excellent job of separating the fictionalized Doc of "Cannery Row" fame from the flesh and blood self-made scientist/adventurer that was Ed Ricketts. "Beyond the Outer Shores" combines rip-snorting travelogue, narrative biography and gossip into the lives of Ricketts, John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell. Easily the best Ricketts book out there. Highly recommended for all aficionados of real-life adventure tales, and indespensible for Steinbeck and Campbell fans.
Rating:
Summary: This Doc Rocks
Review: Tamm does an excellent job of separating the fictionalized Doc of "Cannery Row" fame from the flesh and blood self-made scientist/adventurer that was Ed Ricketts. "Beyond the Outer Shores" combines rip-snorting travelogue, narrative biography and gossip into the lives of Ricketts, John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell. Easily the best Ricketts book out there. Highly recommended for all aficionados of real-life adventure tales, and indespensible for Steinbeck and Campbell fans.
Rating: 
Summary: Almost perfect story of Edward F. Ricketts
Review: This book is a result of considerable research by the author and is very well written. I believe that it is an essential text for anyone interested in the Steinbeck Cannery Row era. The weakness of the book lies in the author's presentation of Ricketts as the primary contributing influence over Steinbeck and even Joseph Campbell. While there is no doubt about Ricketts' contributing influence, Steinbeck and Campbell were contributing and teaching influences on Ricketts and if alive, I believe he would agree. Like Ricketts argument regarding individual creature influence on the tide pool, the primary influence on Steinbeck and Ricketts was the "Row" as the meeting place, a considerably more complex human tide pool. Steinbeck (and Campbell) brought as much to Ricketts as he did with them. More importantly the individual elements of the row such as Carol Steinbeck, the bums, market owner Wing Chong, and the whores consciously and unconsciously influenced the row and as a result, each other. This Ricketts-like, more holistic perspective seems to have escaped the author. The book is fascinating reading in any case.
Rating:
Summary: On Living at the Right Time
Review: Within five years of the death of Ed Ricketts marine biology changed forever. The first was the widespread use of wet suits and self contained underwater breathing devices. The observer no longer was tethered to the shore and could hang motionless in the water at almost any depth observing what was actually happening in the submerged cosmos. Underwater photography allowed dynamic and objective views. Gone were the days of waders and buckets and dry heads.
John Steinbeck in the introduction to between Pacific Tides of 1948 also sensed a different change, an Enlightenment, "The world is being broken down to be built up again, and eventually the sense of the new worlds will come out of the laboratory and penetrate into the smallest living techniques and habits of the whole people". And of course in 1953 Watson and Crick announced the functional structure of DNA.
Ricketts, one the greatest naturalists of all time, was astounded at the array of creatures, mostly animals he found along the shore. He wrote of what he saw and was ostracized by the "legitimate" academic Poo Bahs of his day. But he was clean and pure and loved true things. How would he feel if he could see all of his sea animals displayed in comparative genomics arrays and consider the genes that make them holy?
But about the book. Tamm has captured the light hidden behind the towering figure of Steinbeck and "Doc". He shows Ricketts, complex, gifted and maybe all mixed up as an existensional figure laboring under the stigma of never having taken a degree. Thank God! If Ricketts had become the academic soft science ecologist like David Phillips who revised the fifth edition of Tides, my life would have been far poorer.
This is a wonderful book, but don't stop there. Review Sweet Thursday and the Row. Go once again the the Sea of Cortez. Try to find a 1939 edition of Tides and then the 5th edition so you can properly despise Stanford University Press. We can never know Ed Ricketts but his sweet spirt is everywhere in the sea and the nature around us.
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