Ocean Book of the Month
Every month, The Ocean Project highlights a book focused on our blue planet or environmental sustainability. Books for all age groups will be covered, non-fiction and fiction, prose and poetry. If you have a suggestion, please let us know.
The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
by Henry Beston
What better way to start the year than to transport back in time to a place that reminds us of simpler interactions with our ocean. Occasionally at least, we need to revisit the past in order to solidify our values as we act in the present. Often the shifting baselines of our day-to-day experience permit us to forget how much change has occurred in our environment in just our one lifetime (and the generation before us). The Outermost House lets us linger in the ocean's past for a year while we get ready to confront the adventure of another year in our own life.
As the friends of Henry Beston suggest:
The Outermost House presents us with a time, a place, and a man. The time and place, Cape Cod in the mid-1920's: a wild, windswept outpost of the land. Dominated by ocean and weather, this landscape has been long inhabited but never domesticated. Here, to a tiny house set alone on a dune above the sea, a man has come in solitude to watch, and listen, and bear witness. He watches on winter nights as fishing schooners, last vestiges of the age of sail, move slowly beyond the bar, or come to frozen grief upon it. He listens to the myriad voices of the surf, and attempts, in words, a faithful notation of the music he has heard. He bears witness to the comings and goings of constellations and tides, the nightly patrols of the coast guardsmen who walk the beach; he ponders the dark imperatives that lie behind the migrations of birds and fish, the mysterious "peoples of the sea." Into the vast bright days of autumn he goes, and we go with him, gathering driftwood against the winter nights; in spring we walk inland over the greening moorland, off to meet the alewife run; in summer we kindle our cooking fire on the beach, and sleep between sand-dunes as the constellations wheel above us.
Reconnect yourself vicariously so you can help future generations reconnect with the astonishing variety of phenomena they can experience within earshot of the ocean.
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Find out how you can help do more at the Seas the Day action pages.
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Check out the Henry Beston website.
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If you are interested in reading this book but also want to be a conscious consumer, please visit your local library and check it out.
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If you have any suggestions for a future "Ocean Book of the Month", please let us know. Send us your favorite recent or not-so-recent read so we can share it with all!
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If you're interested in purchasing this book, and then perhaps passing it along to a friend to spread the word, we encourage you to buy locally and from an independent bookseller. Please click on one of the two logos below to purchase a good read and help The Ocean Project.
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