The Discreet Charms of a Bourgeois Beach Town: Rehoboth Beach Stories

Tucked away on the Atlantic shore in often-overlooked Delaware sits Rehoboth Beach, one square mile of cottages, upscale restaurants, fry joints, plein air bars, art galleries, t-shirt shops, and, of course, sandy beaches. Founded in 1872 as a Methodist summer retreat, this little beach town draws a different congregation today, a delightful and eclectic blend of highbrow and lowbrow, homo and hetero, urban and rural. There’s no place quite like it. Author Rich Barnett has been writing about his explorations of Rehoboth Beach and the surrounding environs in his regular column for the magazine Letters from CAMP Rehoboth. Now for the first time, Barnett presents the best of his columns in this lively, humorous, and eccentric look at his adopted home town. While the book focuses on a coastal town in Delaware, the message of scratching below the surface of the places we live and visit in order to get the authentic experience is much broader. There's a "bourgeois beach town" in just about every coastal state, don't you think?