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Summary: My favorite book, read over and over...
Review: A book best read in dim light by a fire. This will allow you to get the feel of the interior of the "Fo'Castle", the name Beston gave of his house upon the dunes on the great beach of Cape Cod. I have traveled to the site of the Outermost House (and do so regularly) and sit upon the sands and take myself back to what it must have been like in Beston's Day. Thought the actual spot where the house once sat has been washed out to sea/eroded away...the area is still there. BUY THIS BOOK, it will soon become your favorite...even better, take it with you to Cape Cod and read it at Nauset Beach!
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Summary: Look out on the sea from the windows of The Outermost House.
Review: An enduring classic, Henry Beston's The Outermost House, takes the reader on a time journey through a year in the life of the seashore of Cape Cod. The passage of time is not recorded with the clock, but with the rhythms the sea, the cycles of the moon, and the changing seasons. The chapter on the headlong wave can make one a little seasick with Beston's undulating passages and rhythmic words. Not a leisurely stroll on the beach, The Outermost House portrays Beston's year-long observations of the sand and the sea as true partners, sometimes betraying one another, other times working in perfect harmony.
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Summary: Know Thyself
Review: Henry Beston on the trail of Thoreau's great hike along the cape stays to capture if he can "the very psyche of animals" and rises to metaphysical levels with the greatest command of the English language. Nature exists, he finds, and "creation is here and now." Everything acts, and acts characteristically, and in detailing their interactions he discovers that he is in them also. Outermost house leads inevitably to innermost house.
Rating:
Summary: Know Thyself
Review: Henry Beston on the trail of Thoreau's great hike along the cape stays to capture if he can "the very psyche of animals" and rises to metaphysical levels with the greatest command of the English language. Nature exists, he finds, and "creation is here and now." Everything acts, and acts characteristically, and in detailing their interactions he discovers that he is in them also. Outermost house leads inevitably to innermost house.
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Summary: Thoreau meets Proust on Cape Cod.
Review: I had never heard of Henry Beston until a friend lent me--or, more accurately, pressed on me--his copy of The Outermost House. After reading this book, I understand his sense of urgency: this is a work of unique and lasting beauty, surely one of the greatest nature books ever written. In detailing his year in his cottage at Eastham Beach (now Coast Guard Beach) on the Atlantic side of Cape Cod, Beston combines a Thoreauvian zeal for nature and the examined life with a Proustian ability to record exactly the sight, sound, feel and scent of the world around him. Page after page is filled with unforgettable passages; his descriptions of the markings and songs of the shore birds alone are enough to move you to tears. His story of the plight of a doe caught in an icy flood is almost as suspenseful as a Hitchcock movie; his tribute to the courage of the Coast Guard "surfmen" who rescue shipwrecked sailors is particularly resonant to us who--after Sept. 11, 2001--have learned something about the value of those who safeguard the public. Beston is so quotable a writer that I'm shocked he's not better known. A few quotes should demonstrate:
"Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man."
"Man can be either less than man or more than man, and both are monsters, the last more dread."
"Poor body, time and the long years were the first tailors to teach you the merciful use of clothes! Though some scold today because you are too much seen, to my mind, you are not seen fully enough or often enough when you are beautiful."
"Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy."
Henry Beston found urban life insupportable in the mid-1920s; who could know the dismay he would feel in 2002, when computers, television and jet planes make the world pass in a blur! Beston is out to teach us how to slow down, to learn to live again according to the patterns and rhythms of nature. For those who are willing to read and understand, The Outermost House remains a haven of peace and beauty.
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Summary: Great reading if you are interested in nature writing
Review: I read this book for my nature writing elective in highschool. Although I did not necessarily like nature writing before this class, the books we read, this in particular, heightened by appreciation for my natural surroundings. I highly recommend it and the only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because its slow in some parts.
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Summary: Bring this book to the Cape and read it on the beach!
Review: If you really want to know a lot about Cape Cod start here. It is probably the best nature book ever written. Clear and well-thought, it is a journey through a single year in the Cape's history. As I side note: if you are interested in Coast Guard history you will find this book very interesting.
Rating:
Summary: Bring this book to the Cape and read it on the beach!
Review: If you really want to know a lot about Cape Cod start here. It is probably the best nature book ever written. Clear and well-thought, it is a journey through a single year in the Cape's history. As I side note: if you are interested in Coast Guard history you will find this book very interesting.
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Summary: A classic of nature writing
Review: Rachel Carson once described The Outermost House as the sole influence on her writing, and Henry Beston's account of a solitary year by the sea has the same combination of natural science and poetry. The theme is one of an isolation that modern man rarely experiences, where the passing seasons are evidenced by different varieties of seabirds, by subtle changes in the wind, the sea, and even the color of the sand. Especially memorable are descriptions of violent nor'easters, shipwrecks, and the perseverence of the quietly heroic coast guard. This is a book to be savored.
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Summary: An American classic
Review: The Outermost House is a classic, not just of natural history literature, but of American literature. If you love the outdoors, or the sea, or prose that flows like poetry, you should keep this small book always nearby. The harried introvert will especially appreciate it: reading even a page or two will transport you to a quiet place where the wind through the dune grass is the only sound that strikes your ear.In addition to being a great writer, Beston is an acute observer biological phenomena, and not a bad theorist either. His discourse on the relationship other animals bear to us ("They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations...") does more to unlink the Great Chain of Being than any philosophical essay. And Beston's influence has been wide-ranging, not only among natural history writers, but among writers in general: unless I am mistaken, The Outermost House is one of the sources for the "Dry Salvages" section of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. (If no one else has noticed that before, I want coauthorship on the paper!) Some books are so memorable that parts of them become internalized on first reading. The first time I read The Outermost House, its final sentence -- as graceful an example of polysyndeton as you will find in English -- became mine. Now, I pass it on to you: "For the gifts of life are the earth's, and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach."
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