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Title: Cape Cod (Penguin Nature Library) by Henry David Thoreau, Paul Theroux ISBN: 0140170022 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5
Rating: 5
Summary: book review
Comment: I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I have moved to the Boston area only a year ago, and this book has helped me learn a lot about the life in and around Cape Cod since 1621. The characters seem almost real with all the trials and tribulations they have had to suffer. I highly recommned it to any reader who enjoys historical novels (the best!).
Rating: 5
Summary: Leave your brain at the door.
Comment: You will forget about the outside world when you read this; nothing but sand, wind, and water. Plus some natural history, local folklore, a few shipwreck tales. Typical Thoreau; he finds beauty, interest, detail in the wilderness. The desolate landscape will help to clear your mind. Highly recommended.
Rating: 5
Summary: Cape Cod is the ultimate desert island beach book.
Comment: Each year, in preparation for a week's retreat to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I go in search of a book that would be perfect for a sojourn on a desert island. Of course, the Outer Banks are hardly deserted--the locals have printed up Wege's infamous photograph of a packed stretch of Coney Island with the caption "Nags Head, circa 2000 A.D."--but there we are on an island for seven days, my husband experiencing near death in the waves while I read. Sometimes we stop these pursuits and prowl the beach. Mostly we live as if we're the last two people on earth (which is easier in the off-peak season).
I've learned that not every book is right for this way of life. The perfect desert island book has to celebrate the place you are in, not transport you. It should offer a tinge of society, because, after all, a human is a social animal, but it should not make you yearn achingly for what has been left behind nor should you be so repelled by it that you will never fit in again when you leave the island (you always leave the island). It should have some narrative sweep to withstand the competition of the seascape. It should make you think, at least a little: you want the stress to wash out to sea, not the little grey cells.
Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau is the benchmark by which I've chosen beach material for several years. it is the quintessential celebration of littoral life. If you are on the beach, you appreciate it all the more; if you are not, well, at least you know vividly what you are missing. There is drama, as in the specter of villagers racing to the shore at the news of a shipwreck. There is information, as in what part of the clam not to eat, how the Indians trapped gulls for food, how a lighthouse really works. There is Thoreau's contagious respect for solitude, his occasional crankiness, and that magic trick of his that can suck in high school sophomores and get them through his books without so much as a whimper.
There is one flaw to Cape Cod: brevity. It lasts about a day and a half on the Robinson Crusoe plan. This is not to say that it does not withstand re-reading, it does, but at some point after you have committed it to memory, you may wish for the collected works of Shakespeare and move onto the Bard's beach play, The Tempest.
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Title: The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod by Henry Beston ISBN: 0805019669 Publisher: Henry Holt (Paper) Pub. Date: 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Maine Woods (Penguin Nature Library) by Henry David Thoreau, Edward Hoagland ISBN: 0140170138 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 1988 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod by Cynthia Huntington ISBN: 0874519349 Publisher: University Press of New England Pub. Date: 1999 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Enduring Shore: A History of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket by Paul Schneider ISBN: 0805067345 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Nature of Cape Cod by Beth Schwarzman, Sandra Hogan McDermott ISBN: 1584651075 Publisher: University Press of New England Pub. Date: 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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