The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
The seventy-fifth anniversary edition of the classic book about Cape Cod, “written with simplicity, sympathy, and beauty” (New York Herald Tribune)A chronicle of a solitary year spent on a Cape Cod beach, The Outermost House has long been recognized as a classic of American nature writing....
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The seventy-fifth anniversary edition of the classic book about Cape Cod, “written with simplicity, sympathy, and beauty” (New York Herald Tribune)A chronicle of a solitary year spent on a Cape Cod beach, The Outermost House has long been recognized as a classic of American nature writing. Henry Beston had originally planned to spend just two weeks in his seaside home, but was so possessed by the mysterious beauty of his surroundings that he found he “could not go.”Instead, he sat down to try and capture in words the wonders of the magical landscape he found himself in thrall to: the migrations of seabirds, the rhythms of the tide, the windblown dunes, and the scatter of stars in the changing summer sky. Beston argued that, “The world today is sick to its thin blood for the lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.” Seventy-five years after they were first published, Beston’s words are more true than ever.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780805073683 (080507368X)
ASIN: 080507368X
Publish date: July 1st 2003
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Pages no: 256
Edition language: English
Category:
Classics,
Non Fiction,
Travel,
Autobiography,
Memoir,
Biography,
Writing,
Essays,
Science,
Environment,
Nature,
Natural History,
Science Nature
This review was originally posted on amazon on April 6, 2005. I'm going to begin with a quote from the book:"Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor...
The prose is stately and old-fashioned, but Beston really has a way of vividly describing the rolling of the waves, the endless winds, and the stars on his silent beach. It's hard to imagine that there's no silence like that any more.