The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

In 1925 Beston spent a year living in a simple two-room home on the outer arm of Cape Cod, facing the wide Atlantic Ocean. This book is a series of essays documenting the seasons there.

Beston believed that poetry had as much to do with his observations as science did, and his prose is “burnished, polished sentences, richly metaphoric and musical, that beg to be read aloud.” (Robert Finch, Introduction)

This is a book to be read in small doses and savoured. It’s everything I had hoped Walden would be, but wasn’t. Highly recommended. 5 stars.

Read this if: you love lyrical descriptions of creation’s beauty; or you want a glimpse of a vanished Cape Cod. ( )

This was a really beautiful meditation on living for a year on top of a dune on Cape Cod. If you don't like birds, or the Cape, or the constant sound of the surf, pounding Nauset Beach's (or any beach's, I suppose) shores, you probably shouldn't read this book.
If you *love* birds you'll probably own a copy or two of this book and will have stayed at Henry Beston's now long-destroyed Fo'castle, which perished in the Blizzard of '78, which apparently hated birds.

Henry Beston built a two room house on Coast Guard Beach on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Originally the house was designed to be a summer getaway cabin but after two weeks Beston decided to see what it would be like to spend a year on the beach. During that time he wrote a memoir of the experience, recording everything he saw, heard, smelled, touched and experienced. As a result he published The Outermost House which became a best seller. Along the lines of Thoreau, Beston was enamored with living the simple life and experiencing nature in it most raw form. There were many times I found myself agreeing with Beston or being envious of his adventure. Even the storms that blew up the beach produced fascinating fodder for Beston's book. ( )

Not a huge fan of nature writing, me, but this one had me hooked - at least for most part. There is an earnest passion in the writing that is hard to be indifferent to, and some passages, like the ones about the sound of the sea for instance, is simply magical.

It is also surprisingly dramatic, with its descriptions of the harsh conditions on and around Cape Cod, storms, shipwrecks and all. ( )

Henry Beston decided to try to live a full year in a tiny cottage on the sand dunes of Cape Cod, that little shoe-like stretch of land that juts out below Boston on North America's East Coast and frequently battered by stormy Nor'Easters. This was in 1926, and his only human companions were the people at the Coast Guard Stations, who walked the beach nightly to look for ships in distress, since this is a famously disastrous coastline with many sandbars, bad weather, and stormy skies. But the ships and people form only a small part of his diary, which is probably among the best nature writing I have read in English.

He describes, feels, and paints with words the migration of the seabirds, the swallows in the air, insect life, stranded fishes, and grassy dunes. Straightforward, gorgeous, and filled with impressionistic sentences, this is a wonderful book to read. Beston describes a different time, without phones and regular transportation, but the same birds are still flying north every spring, and the same beach plums are ripening in September.

I got my 1949 edition on Bookmooch, but this title is still in print. It is considered a classic, but I have read many classics that don't live up to becoming my own classic books. This one is far beyond classic.

Beston's cottage and land was given to the Audobon Society in 1960, and was finally reclaimed by the sea in 1978, when the storms had eroded the beach so much that the house was swept away during a big winterstorm.

Read more: http://pondpond.blogspot.com/2011/04/book-review-outermost-house-by-henry.html#i...
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