Birds Art Life
A Year of Observation
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Narrated by:
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Laurel Lefkow
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By:
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Kyo Maclear
About this listen
A writer's search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this intimate and exuberant meditation on creativity and life - a field guide to things small and significant.
For Vladimir Nabokov, it was butterflies. For John Cage, it was mushrooms. For Sylvia Plath, it was bees. Each of these artists took time away from their work to become observers of natural phenomena. In 2012, Kyo Maclear met a local Toronto musician with an equally captivating side passion - he had recently lost his heart to birds. Curious about what prompted this young urban artist to suddenly embrace nature, Kyo decides to follow him for a year and find out.
A distilled, crystal-like companion to H Is for Hawk, this memoir celebrates the particular madness of loving and chasing after birds in a big city. Intimate and philosophical, moving with ease between the granular and the grand view, it celebrates the creative and liberating effects of keeping your eyes and ears wide open and explores what happens when you apply the core lessons of birding to other aspects of life. In one sense this is a book about disconnection - how our passions can buckle under the demands and emotions of daily life - and about reconnection: how the act of seeking passion and beauty in small ways can lead us to discover our most satisfying life. On a deeper level, it takes up the questions of how we are shaped and nurtured by our parallel passions and how we might come to cherish not only the world's pristine natural places but also the blemished urban spaces where most of us live.
Birds Art Life follows two artists on a yearlong adventure that is at once a meditation on the nature of creativity and a quest for a good and meaningful life.
©2017 Kyo Maclear (P)2017 Penguin Random House CanadaListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
2017, Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design–Prose Non-Fiction, First Prize
2017, Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, Shortlist
2017, Nautilus Gold Award, Lyrical Prose–Gold Winner
2018, Trillium Book Award, Winner
"A wondrous little book about 'being a little lost'." (The New York Times)
"Every now and then you read a book that changes the way you see the world. For me, Birds Art Life is one such book. The writing is marvelously pure and honest and light. At the same time, magically, it is erudite, generous and brimming with meaning and event. It is a book I know I will return to again and again for inspiration and solace." (Barbara Gowdy, author of The White Bone and We So Seldom Look on Love)
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Patsy Clairmont loves a good twirl. The kind that will make a child fall to the ground, squeal with laughter, and then want to get up and spin in circles some more! However, there is a twirl where busy schedules and urgency create a different and unwanted variety of dizzy in our lives. Though hurry-up is part of the human dilemma and certain seasons bring more of it than others, if it becomes a lifestyle you might find yourself on the slippery slopes of bitterness, sadness, and depression.
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She's a Gem!
- By Amy Ramirez on 07-29-22
By: Patsy Clairmont
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Almost Anywhere
- Road-Trip Ruminations on Love, Nature, Recovery, and Nonsense
- By: Krista Schlyer
- Narrated by: Marisa Vitali
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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What do you do when your world ends? At 28 years old, Krista Schlyer sold almost everything she owned and packed the rest of it in a station wagon bound for the American wild. Her two best friends joined her - one a grumpy, grieving introvert, the other a feisty dog - and together they sought out every national park, historic site, forest, and wilderness they could get to before their money ran out or their minds gave in.
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No a travelogue - its a diary
- By Jonathan on 12-29-20
By: Krista Schlyer
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Already Here
- A Doctor Discovers the Truth About Heaven
- By: Leo Galland M.D.
- Narrated by: Leo Galland M.D.
- Length: 4 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Already Here tells of the death of Leo Galland's son, Christopher, at age 22; the direct visual evidence Christopher showed Leo that our souls do go on; and the communications from Christopher's spirit that changed Leo's understanding of life and its meaning. In life, Christopher was a brain-damaged special-needs child who challenged everyone he knew with unpredictable behavior and uncanny insights. After his death, he revealed to Leo the real purpose of his life, as a spiritual guide who taught others by confounding their assumptions and expectations.
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I needed this book. thanks Doctor.
- By Anonymous User on 08-08-18
By: Leo Galland M.D.
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Let's Take the Long Way Home
- A Memoir of Friendship
- By: Gail Caldwell
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In Let's Take the Long Way Home, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gail Caldwell offers a powerful and moving memoir about her coming-of-age in mid-life and her extraordinary friendship with Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story. Though they are more different than alike, these two fiercely private, independent women quickly relax into a friendship more profound than either of them expected. They grow increasingly inseparable until, in 2003, Caroline is diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer.
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Uniquely wonderful book
- By Lucie on 09-07-10
By: Gail Caldwell
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On Elizabeth Bishop
- By: Colm Tóibín
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In this book novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences - the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own.
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ELIZABETH BISHOP
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 05-19-16
By: Colm Tóibín
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Thunder and Lightning
- Cracking Open the Writer's Craft
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The challenge we face as writers, Natalie Goldberg says, begins with the process of turning inward and then trying to communicate what we find. From the secret of letting characters and stories "write themselves" to finding mentor sources and responding to criticism to writing's one essential ingredient, which is the mind - here are all-new Zen-based lessons and reflections, refined and proven at Natalie's acclaimed national writers' workshops.
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Inspiring
- By StoryDtechtive on 02-11-17
By: Natalie Goldberg
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All the Lives We Never Lived
- By: Anuradha Roy
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Sleeping on Jupiter, The Folded Earth, and An Atlas of Impossible Longing, a poignant and sweeping novel set in India during World War II and the present day about a son’s quest to uncover the truth about his mother....
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Beautiful book
- By Sonia S. on 12-13-19
By: Anuradha Roy
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Outline
- The Outline Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Kate Lock
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens.
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Difficult and Better in Print
- By Nick O. on 07-18-23
By: Rachel Cusk
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Manhood for Amateurs
- The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: Michael Chabon
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as a father, Chabon's memories of childhood, of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, are like a theme played by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor. At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, Manhood for Amateurs is destined to become a classic.
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Terrible
- By Ken on 10-14-09
By: Michael Chabon
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The Trip to Echo Spring
- On Writers and Drinking
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.
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Great Narration!!!!!! Great story about 20 Century make writer who suffer with alcoholism. If you like this topic and want more
- By Pamela Abbey on 04-25-21
By: Olivia Laing
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Lost Among the Birds
- Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year
- By: Neil Hayward
- Narrated by: Sam Devereaux
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Early in 2013 Neil Hayward was at a crossroads. He didn't want to open a bakery or whatever else executives do when they quit a lucrative but unfulfilling job. He didn't want to think about his failed relationship with 'the one' or his potential for ruining a new relationship with 'the next one'. And he almost certainly didn't want to think about turning 40. And so instead he went birding. Birding was a lifelong passion. It was only among the birds that Neil found a calm that had eluded him in the confusing world of humans.
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Know a Birder? This will help you Understand.
- By Carole T. on 08-27-17
By: Neil Hayward
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Driving on the Rim
- By: Thomas McGuane
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The unforgettable voyager of this dark picaresque is I. B. "Berl" Pickett, M.D., whose die was probably cast the moment his mother thought to name him after Irving Berlin. Other insults piled on apace thereafter: the spasms of Pentecostal Sunday worship; the social debilitation of following his parents' itinerant rug-shampooing business; the erotic initiation at the hands of his aunt. It's hard to imagine what would have become of him had he not gone to medical school.
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Delightful
- By Roy on 01-05-11
By: Thomas McGuane
What listeners say about Birds Art Life
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Rebecca
- 08-01-19
a lovely reading
a lovely, clear and enjoyable reading of a book worth a second read. highly recommend. poetic and eye opening
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