Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides [Paperback]

For his 21st birthday, Nicolson's father gave him some islands among the Scottish Outer Hebrides, 600 acres worth of land that the elder Nicolson had purchased on a whim in 1937. At various times, the Sussex-based writer recalls, the Shiant islands "have been the most important thing in my life," and he has produced a vivid, meticulously researched paean to his "heartland," examining its geology, its flora and fauna, and its history as he reminisces about his own idylls there. The islands, now uninhabited except by the Nicolsons, are outcroppings of grass and rock and stark black cliffs, surrounded by churning waters that are notoriously difficult to negotiate. Until 1901, they were continuously inhabited for thousands of years by an eighth-century hermit, medieval farmers, Irish Jacobite rebels and others documented by Nicolson. The islands are also an important breeding station for birds, and Nicolson observes the comings and goings of geese, puffins and razorbills. Throughout the book, Nicolson explores the troubling idea of ownership; Hebrideans view English landowners with a mix of resentment and derision, and Nicolson acknowledges that his rights to the islands, like those of previous landlords, are morally ambiguous. His mix of scholarship, reflection and lyrical description brings his beloved atolls to life, and the genre-bending book should win some fans among those interested in nature writing and memoir.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Nicolson has what most can only dream of: his own island. Actually, the property consists of three remote Scottish islands, the Shiants, located in the Hebrides and purchased by Nicolson's father through a 1937 newspaper advertisement. The grandson of Vita Sackville-West, Nicolson, who was given the islands with their cliffs, sheep, rats, and birds on his 21st birthday by his father, has written Sea Room as a self-proclaimed "love letter" that captures the character of the place. More intellectually weighty than most travel narratives, Nicolson's book offers as much information about the geological origins of the islands, the seasonal details of the flora and fauna, and the melding of Norse language into the culture as it does about the author's solitary boat rides and peaceful beachcombing adventures. The comprehensive bibliography and index indicate a love and knowledge of the island that goes well beyond that of an occasional visitor or tourist. Nicolson is the islands' resident historian and scientist, and as he prepares to give the islands to his own son, he can do so knowing that his gift is not merely sentimental but substantive. Recommended for all travel collections. Mari Flynn, Keystone Coll., La Plume, PA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

*Starred Review* When Nicolson was 21, his father gave him the tiny Shiant Islands a few miles east of Lewis, the biggest of the Outer Hebrides, and somewhat more miles northwest of Skye, largest of the Inner Hebrides. Nicolson already knew the place well, having spent many holidays there with family and friends, and alone. There is a two-room house near the easiest landing, and Nicolson repaired to it for the year that this rhapsodical tribute records. He conducts us through the months in the Shiants, for each unfolding part of Shiants history and telling of the experts he brought in to see what the place could tell them, which included the shepherds with whom he rounded up the fattened lambs in the fall. He demonstrates that the Shiants were a vital part of several cultures, which became remote only as industrial capitalism centralized enterprises and profits. This history is finely and personally relayed, but what is best in the book is Nicolson's intensely sensual detailing of his sailing of the waters around the islands; of air, rock, soil, flora, and light; of the spirituality historically assigned to the place and which lingers there; and of what it must have been like to live there over the centuries. Magnificent and poetic, this is a literary and ecological masterpiece. Ray Olson
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