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Bird Cloud: A Memoir

by Annie Proulx

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4343357,217 (3.31)51
"Bird Cloud" is the name the author 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. She 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. Her first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, this book 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. The author 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.… (more)
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» See also 51 mentions

English (32)  French (1)  All languages (33)
Showing 1-5 of 32 (next | show all)
Very little about nature, way too much about building a house, dealing with contractors. Sadly boring. ( )
  monicaberger | Jan 22, 2024 |
Part biography, part nature book and part home build biography of an American writer" ( )
  PDCRead | Apr 6, 2020 |
So readable about a topic of which I have little interest... ( )
  Smoscoso | Sep 12, 2019 |
All about designing and building a house on former Nature Conservancy land in Wyoming. Some history, some geology, a vivid evocation of the unforgiving landscape--a life lived very close to nature. Skimmed a little. (A rather tedious chapter on her genealogy nonetheless offers interesting insight on the origins of some of the material for Barkskins.) ( )
  beaujoe | Sep 9, 2018 |
Read 100 pages & concluded: Who cares? ( )
  Siubhan | Feb 28, 2018 |
Showing 1-5 of 32 (next | show all)
Reading Ms. Proulx’s prose is like bouncing along rutted country roads in a pickup truck with no shock absorbers. Her books are packed with arcane flora and fauna and eccentrically named towns and characters. Many writers employ unusual verbs and adjectives; Ms. Proulx likes weird nouns. Her cluttered style is, in a kind of reverse way, as jewel-encrusted as Gustav Klimt’s.

In “Bird Cloud” these qualities turn against her. She visually absorbs Wyoming’s long vistas and spits out data like a seed catalog.
added by lorax | editNew York Times, Dwight Garner (Jan 4, 2011)
 
There are three brilliantly researched and written chapters in Bird Cloud that construct a fine gallery interpreting the human and natural history of a wild stretch of Wyoming landscape. Unfortunately, they are the last three chapters and to get to them we have to make it through a meandering, overwrought and badly conceived foyer of “I-built-a-house” memoir, seven chapters long....For the reader, though, it also signals the disappointment of the first two-thirds of her book. We stand at a window Proulx created to provide a certain view, but in looking through it we wonder just what it was she wanted us to see
 
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Epigraph
. . . a very curious dish of Viennese sausages which were sizzling hot at one end and frozen at the other -- a striking example of the non-conductivity of sausages in high altitudes. --H. W. Tilman
Dedication
For Harry Teague who designed it
and for the James Gang who built it
and for Dudley Gardner who dug it
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The cow-speckled landscape is an ashy grey color.
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"Bird Cloud" is the name the author 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. She 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. Her first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, this book 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. The author 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.

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