
The Outermost House
A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod
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Narrated by:
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Brett Barry
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By:
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Henry Beston
In 1926, Henry Beston spent two weeks in a two-room cottage on the sand dunes of Cape Cod. He had not intended to stay longer, but, as he later wrote, "I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go."
Beston stayed for a year, meditating on humanity and the natural world. In The Outermost House, originally published in 1928, he poetically chronicled the four seasons at the beach: the ebb and flow of the tides, the migration of birds, storms, stars, and solitude. The landscape was his major character, and his writing provides a snapshot of the Cape, a place physically changed yet still as soulful 80 years later.
Like Henry D. Thoreau before him, and Rachel Carson after him, Beston was a writer of stunning beauty, importance, and vision. Robert Finch once wrote of him, "His are burnished, polished sentences, richly metaphoric and musical, that beg to be read aloud."
©1928 Kate Barnes (P)2007 Silver Hollow Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"Clear and full of life." ( The Nation)
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A love poem to The Cape
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Listened to this for more than22,000 hours this is not a typo
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Splendid & evocative!
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Great book
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Enchanting
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Wonderful narration of classic Beston novel
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However, as so many reviewers over the decades have noted, there is something captivating, calming in an almost otherworldly way, poetic, and even thrilling in Beston's writing. The book is ostensibly a memoir, but one begins to perceive a greater purpose beyond simply cataloging the seasons of the year at Cape Cod, when one learns that not all of his scientific observations are accurate or even specific to the given season in which they are described. So his purpose is not to teach naturalism, per se, but to convey a sense of the sublime beauty, preciousness, majesty, and drama of the nature he is describing. He does so in a loosely narrative form, and every single time I read or listen to The Outermost House I find myself drawn into the experience of the narrator, and the book somehow, magically, becomes a page-turner.
The Outermost House has maintained its status as a classic of American literature, and a cornerstone of nature writing, because Beston succeeds so completely and everything he has set out to do. I highly recommend both the print and audiobook versions.
beautifully written, beautifully narrated
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On my all time top 10
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A remarkable story
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