North Carolina Beaches

North Carolina is lucky to have such wonderful beaches to visit. Are you heading to the beach this summer? Would you like to learn more about North Carolina’s beaches? These books will fill you in on the history and culture of NC’s beautiful coast as well as help you plan your trip.

North Carolina Beaches by Glenn Morris

North Carolina Beaches by Glenn Morris

Long hailed as the best guide to enjoying the state’s 320 miles of coastline, North Carolina Beaches will help you find just the right spot for a long vacation or a one-day getaway.  In a beach-by-beach tour, Morris details attractions and activities and provides phone numbers, addresses, and websites to help with your trip planning.

How to Read an North Carolina Beach by Orrin H. Pilkey

How to Read a North Carolina Beach: Bubble Holes, Barking Sands, and Rippled Runnels by Orrin H. Pilkey

Take a walk on the beach with three coastal experts who reveal the secrets and the science of the North Carolina shoreline. What makes sea foam? What are those tiny sand volcanoes along the waterline? You’ll find the answers to these questions and dozens more in this comprehensive field guide to the state’s beaches, which shows visitors how to decipher the mysteries of the beach and interpret clues to an ever-changing geological story.

Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue by Walt Wolfram

Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue by Walt Wolfram

As many visitors to Ocracoke will attest, the island’s vibrant dialect is one of its most distinctive cultural features. In Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks, Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes present a fascinating account of the Ocracoke brogue. They trace its development, identify the elements of pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax that make it unique, and even provide a glossary and quiz to enhance the reader’s knowledge of ‘Ocracokisms.’

Ocracoke Wild: A Naturalist's Year on an Outer Banks Island by Pat Garber

Ocracoke Wild: A Naturalist’s Year on an Outer Banks Island by Pat Garber

Pat Garber knows an Ocracoke that few visitors ever see, and she offers it to all in this book filled with Ocracoke’s beauty and wonder. Whether writing about helping baby loggerhead turtles to get a head start on life, banding brown pelicans, stumbling into a mating ritual of horseshoe crabs, or the touching reunion of a beached and wounded bottlenose dolphin with its mate, she does it with a clarity and grace that puts the reader at the scene and stresses the importance of nature not just to the inhabitants of Ocracoke but to all of us, everywhere.

Triumph at Kitty Hawk: The Wright Brothers and Powered Flight by Thomas C. Parramore

Triumph at Kitty Hawk: The Wright Brothers and Powered Flight by Thomas C. Parramore

Examines the Wright brothers’ exploits from a North Carolina perspective and focuses on the major role played by Tar Heels in the successful flights at Kitty Hawk. Includes a chapter on aviation in North Carolina before 1903, featuring early Tar heel aeronauts and their attempts to fly.

About Courtney Bippley

Courtney is a Reference Librarian at the Main Campus Library. Her favorite genres are fantasy and science fiction. She loves dogs, coffee, and dancing.