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Title details for Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx - Available

Bird Cloud

A Memoir

by Annie Proulx
Joan Allen
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of Annie Proulx's piece of the Wyoming landscape and her home there.
"Bird Cloud" is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.

Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor, and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho, and Shoshone Indians—and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers.

Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 4, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780743597258
      • File size: 229989 KB
      • Duration: 07:59:08

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 27, 2010
      The Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Brokeback Mountain portrays her flawed paradise in the majestic, hardscrabble West in this vibrant memoir. Proulx bought a 640-acre nature preserve by the North Platte River in Wyoming and started building her dream house, a project that took years and went hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget. In her bustling account, Proulx salivates over the prospect of a Japanese soak tub, polished concrete floor, solar panels, and luxe furnishings that often turn into pricey engineering fiascoes. The meticulous master builders she dubs the James Gang are the book's heroes. Though the house never quite lives up to its promise, it does inspire the author's engrossing natural history of the locale. Proulx drives cattle off of the overgrazed terrain; finds stone arrowheads; recounts the lore of the Indians, ranchers, and foppish big-game hunters who contested the land; and documents the antics of the eagles, magpies, mountain lions, and other critters who tolerate her presence. Like her fiction, Proulx's memoir flows from a memorable landscape where "the sagebrush seems nearly black and beaten low by the ceaseless wind"; the result is a fine evocation of place that becomes a meditation on the importance of a home, however harsh and evanescent.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The author of THE SHIPPING NEWS and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN has written a meditation on place--a bend in the North Platte River in Wyoming--and a process--the careful planning and construction of her house. Proulx, a National Book Award winner, also shares a brief history of her early life--and in her own voice, too. Though Joan Allen is billed as the narrator of this production, Proulx reads the first chapter, which recounts some of her history, debunks a cherished family myth, and acknowledges a debt to a garrulous shopkeeper. When the delivery shifts to Allen with the second chapter, one can't help feeling a sense of loss as the rough edges of the author's voice give way to the flawless consistency of the professional. The listener must wait until Proulx's dream house has been constructed before the audiobook finds its footing again when the author herself revels in the beauty and history of her particular corner of the sky. E.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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