Smell the seaweed and hear gulls' cries as you read this whirlwind social history of that strip of sand, shingle or rock where we escape our lives and worries. Providing an erudite and entertaining account of the role played by the beach in our history - and its effect on society, sexuality, fashion, health and leisure - the clearly beach-obsessed authors present wonderful archive photos and little-known facts for sand and sea lovers (in 17th-century England, for instance, despite strict social mores on land, women and men bathed naked together in the sea). From the sea myths and hedonism of classical Greece and Rome through the 17th-century view of the sea as therapy (for drinking as well as total immersion) and the advent of sun worship in the 1920s to the environmental destruction of the 1990s, we are enticed to "come to the beach to slip through a crack of time into the paradise of self-forgetfulness."