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3.98 AVERAGE
3.98 AVERAGE
“Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. 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.”
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
"the wave is tripped by the shoaling sand-the giant stumbles, crashes, and is pushed over and ahead..."
I love this writing style. I've noted so many phrases & whole passages and pages in this book! Beston's turn of phrase being so spot on and poetic without being too flowery. Through the pages, his reverence and knowledge warmed my heart. I learned about things I didn't expect, including ornithology and shipwrecks. Some of the in-depth bird descriptions didn't excite me as I'm not a bird watcher or enthusiast, just something to be aware of going into this book.
Just a note - It's not necessarily a summer read, as over halfway it covers the winter at the beach. I admire him for sticking it out during one of the harshest winters without complaint. It is most definitely a cozy read. 4.5 stars
I love this writing style. I've noted so many phrases & whole passages and pages in this book! Beston's turn of phrase being so spot on and poetic without being too flowery. Through the pages, his reverence and knowledge warmed my heart. I learned about things I didn't expect, including ornithology and shipwrecks. Some of the in-depth bird descriptions didn't excite me as I'm not a bird watcher or enthusiast, just something to be aware of going into this book.
Just a note - It's not necessarily a summer read, as over halfway it covers the winter at the beach. I admire him for sticking it out during one of the harshest winters without complaint. It is most definitely a cozy read. 4.5 stars
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.
I struggled with this book's dense prose, partly because I'm not well. The writing is beautiful but it is pretty much pure nature-writing. There is no sense of the writer, little of other people and hardly any history. One for people who prefer natural description without humans.
Ii expected to feel relaxed reading about the natural beauty of Cape Cod but in truth I was just bored.
I picked this up while vacationing there and read sections of it on and off. The descriptions are beautiful but dull.
I picked this up while vacationing there and read sections of it on and off. The descriptions are beautiful but dull.
Read this over three days of vacationing on the Outer Cape. If you spend anytime around here, or simply want to hear of the wisdom of Nature, read this book!
Originally published in 1928, and still in print today, this is perhaps one of the early examples of literary nature writing, an account of a year spent living among the sand dunes of the great peninsula of Cape Cod, living closer to a rough sea nature in all her aspects than most humans normally do and observing all that passes through all the senses during that time.
Having planned to stay two weeks in his house on the sand dunes, his fascination with the changes of the dunes, the tides, the sky, the migration of birds and butterflies keep him captivated, so he keeps extending his stay, observing the minutiae of life and nature, writing it into this book.
I first came across the title while reading one of my favourite nature writing books by Rachel Carson, [book:Under the Sea Wind|70824], in which she mentions this as one of her inspirations. And though I enjoyed Henry Beston's book considerably, Carson's book for me left a much greater impression, for who not forget seeing life through the eyes of the very creatures Henry Beston observes. Carson chose to narrate the three parts of her book from the point of view of a sanderling (bird), a mackerel, and a migrating eel. If you haven't read it and loved this book, I am sure you will enjoy and appreciate Rachel Carson's personal favourite of all the books she wrote.
I got the impression Henry Beston may have been something of an insomniac, or perhaps it was because during winter he abandoned the cold bedroom and slept in his front room, where there was the warmth of the fire and the changing light of the seven windows he'd included in his simple design. Often throughout the book, he awakes in the night and so making the most of it, like an unwitting opportunity, he dresses and goes out to see what's up. And although one might think that one night is like another, he always finds something to observe, reflect on and write about.
He built the house himself and was often visited by the "surfmen" who patrolled the coastline, making sure he'd survived the latest storm, men he said who knew the conditions of that coast like no other, not like sailors, but like those who are land based who watch and know as he learned to, how the elements can change quickly and have little compassion for floating man made vessels that try to navigate its peripheries.
It's the late 1920's and no doubt a year like any other, with its share of wrecks, disasters and the pragmatic attitudes of the locals, as likely to come to the rescue and do anything to help, as they are to salvage what is left behind.
To get a feel for the prose, I'm sharing a few of the passages I highlighted as I read.
He develops a compassion and understanding for birds and animals and insects that he finds at odds with what an education (or perhaps religion) has taught him, he questions the self-perceived superiority of man and wonders that we ought not perhaps rethink this arrogance.
And he attempts to put into words, his great awe and the magnificence of the ocean, implying that of nature's three great elemental sounds in nature (the rain, the wind and the sound of outer ocean on a beach) the ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.
He is prone to talk of the sounds of natures as if they were a symphony of his making.
Having planned to stay two weeks in his house on the sand dunes, his fascination with the changes of the dunes, the tides, the sky, the migration of birds and butterflies keep him captivated, so he keeps extending his stay, observing the minutiae of life and nature, writing it into this book.
I first came across the title while reading one of my favourite nature writing books by Rachel Carson, [book:Under the Sea Wind|70824], in which she mentions this as one of her inspirations. And though I enjoyed Henry Beston's book considerably, Carson's book for me left a much greater impression, for who not forget seeing life through the eyes of the very creatures Henry Beston observes. Carson chose to narrate the three parts of her book from the point of view of a sanderling (bird), a mackerel, and a migrating eel. If you haven't read it and loved this book, I am sure you will enjoy and appreciate Rachel Carson's personal favourite of all the books she wrote.
I got the impression Henry Beston may have been something of an insomniac, or perhaps it was because during winter he abandoned the cold bedroom and slept in his front room, where there was the warmth of the fire and the changing light of the seven windows he'd included in his simple design. Often throughout the book, he awakes in the night and so making the most of it, like an unwitting opportunity, he dresses and goes out to see what's up. And although one might think that one night is like another, he always finds something to observe, reflect on and write about.
He built the house himself and was often visited by the "surfmen" who patrolled the coastline, making sure he'd survived the latest storm, men he said who knew the conditions of that coast like no other, not like sailors, but like those who are land based who watch and know as he learned to, how the elements can change quickly and have little compassion for floating man made vessels that try to navigate its peripheries.
It's the late 1920's and no doubt a year like any other, with its share of wrecks, disasters and the pragmatic attitudes of the locals, as likely to come to the rescue and do anything to help, as they are to salvage what is left behind.
"a wreck was treasure trove, a free gift of the sea; even to-day, the usable parts of a wreck are liable to melt away in a curious manner."
To get a feel for the prose, I'm sharing a few of the passages I highlighted as I read.
He develops a compassion and understanding for birds and animals and insects that he finds at odds with what an education (or perhaps religion) has taught him, he questions the self-perceived superiority of man and wonders that we ought not perhaps rethink this arrogance.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilisation surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of earth."
And he attempts to put into words, his great awe and the magnificence of the ocean, implying that of nature's three great elemental sounds in nature (the rain, the wind and the sound of outer ocean on a beach) the ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.
"For it is a mistake to talk of the monotone of ocean or of the monotonous nature of its sound. The sea has many voices. Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings and heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, sharp, rifle-shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk of people in the sea. And not only is the great sound varied in the manner of its making, it is also constantly changing its tempo, its pitch, its accent, and its rhythm, being now loud and thundering, now almost placid, now furious, now grave and solemn-slow, now a simple measure, now a rhythm monstrous with a sense of purpose and elemental will."
He is prone to talk of the sounds of natures as if they were a symphony of his making.
As I muse here, it occurs to me that we not sufficiently grateful for the great symphony of natural sound which insects add to the natural scene; indeed, we take it so much as a matter of course that it does not not stir our fully conscious attention. But all those little fiddles in the grass, , all those cricket pipes, those delicate flutes, are they not lovely beyond words when heard in midsummer on a moonlight night.
I love natural history books/memoirs/what have you and I am a beach freak, but this book, which shows up on every list of important natural history books ever, just left me cold.
I have not been to Cape Cod and did not find the author's rambling descriptions provided any comprehensible profile of the area.
While there is the occasional interesting observation, it is not until the last 40 or so pages that there is any real depth of description of wildlife/shore life. Most of the book is discussion about the author's isolation, the Coast Guard and shipwrecks (which, admittedly, might be the most fascinating part of the book) occasionally peppered with a natural history observation, most of which are slightly old-fashioned versions of "Hey, I saw a bird today!"
Needless to say I'm disappointed.
I have not been to Cape Cod and did not find the author's rambling descriptions provided any comprehensible profile of the area.
While there is the occasional interesting observation, it is not until the last 40 or so pages that there is any real depth of description of wildlife/shore life. Most of the book is discussion about the author's isolation, the Coast Guard and shipwrecks (which, admittedly, might be the most fascinating part of the book) occasionally peppered with a natural history observation, most of which are slightly old-fashioned versions of "Hey, I saw a bird today!"
Needless to say I'm disappointed.
An interesting overview of life on Cape Cod, but a bit too packed with common and Latin animal names for me (someone who doesn't already know them). I spent a lot of time looking up animal images just to see what he was referring to. It pulled me out of the tale he was relating.