Bird Cloud

A Memoir

By: Annie Proulx

Narrated by: Joan Allen

“Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and 400-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.

Proulx’s first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, 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 19th-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. Bird Cloud is magnificent.

©2011 Simon & Schuster (P)2011 Dead Line, Ltd

Critic reviews

“Proulx [is] the laureate of the Wyoming outback and the Canadian shore… Her depictions of the Wyoming landscape in all its moods are in keeping with the best of the Western nature-writing tradition, full of celebration and evocation.” ( Kirkus)

“With a scientist’s exactitude, an artist’s attunement to beauty, and a storyteller’s enchantment, Proulx takes us through the building of a home, intimacy with place, and reclamation of the past.” (Donna Seaman, Booklist)

Craft vs. History

OK... I've also built a house, so I am familiar with the ins and outs... and so is Annie it seems. But for those of you who are looking for the Proulx twists and turns... the subtle and the grand stories weaving through fabulous characterizations and ironic plots, you will be disappointed. There is no mystery or mastery, only a house being built where it should not be by a tough and whimsical woman.

This book is for Anne Proulx Fans

This book is a mix of several genres: autobiography, historian, house builder. I enjoyed picking up little tidbits of her life but if you were expecting a start-middle-end, this is not for you.

WRETCHEDLY DISAPPOINTING, FRUSTRATING, DISGUSTING

This is NOT Tracy Kidder's "House" nor Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," both of which I loved and which stayed with me and to which I will return. I loved "Ace in the Hole" and bailed from "Accordion Crimes" because it was so sad and negative. Now I will say I don't like Annie Proulx, no matter how brilliant or intellectual she is. She's a pissy old biddy, intent on raining on my parade, injecting as many little digs and sad turns as she can think of! I don't want to hear about this woman's way-back family tree with mis-pronounced French. I don't want to hear the ins and outs of building some crappy house! And I don't want to hear a history of the abuse of wildlife and aboriginal peoples by white settlers. I work to help wildlife, and I'm part Native American. If I want to read PETA literature, I can. If I want to rub salt into all the old wounds, I can go to the history books. Now I've seen pictures of the house and the land arround it. I can only ask where was this woman's head? What happened to "cozy"? In visiting Lisbon, I was touched to learn that in winter time, the Portuguese royal family retreated to just a few low-ceilinged rooms, huddled around huge porcelain stoves. I look at Architectural Digest and think to myself that I wouldn't mind visiting those palaces, but I truly prefer smaller rooms. Now I live in the Lake Tahoe area where windows are double-paned and real estate prices are out of sight. I would not buy even a 900 square foot ski condo without finding out personally what it sounds like when twenty-something skiers (different renters every week, so no way to establish rapport or educate them!) tromp on the stairs just outside. Well, other reviewers have expressed our common frustration better than I can. The book is badly written, part miserable house building and the rest only fair nature observation. I've had it with Proulx.

Verbose dudd

This book lacked a point.
Was the author looking for the perfect residence? Why did she spend most, if not all of her personal fortune on ,what turned out to be, a summer residence? Was she trying to compare herself to the birds she loved to watch?
While the descriptions of both Wyoming’s flora and fauna were beautiful and rivaled that of Teddy Roosevelt’s descriptions of the Grand Canyon , the book was simply wordy to stay in my collection. I accidentally skipped a few chapters due a playback glitch and, didn’t even notice.