Bird Cloud: A Memoir

Bird Cloud: A Memoir

3.0 of 5 stars 3.00  ·  rating details  ·  672 ratings  ·  200 reviews
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 a...more
Hardcover, 234 pages
Published January 4th 2011 by New York: Scribner
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Petra X
"Well do I know my own character negatives," she writes, "bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded." Says Annie Proulx. What she didn't add was that she was downright stupid when it came to checking important details.

The book is about Annie looking for the perfect place to build the home of her dreams, the one she looks forward to living in for the rest of her life. She finds the site in a wild place in Wyoming, far from any town or neighbours with only the cries of eagle...more
Carol
I love Annie Proulx's writing and I also love books about the West and meditative works on the natural world. Add these likes with my passion for HGTV and this book seemed like a natural fit for me. Ms Proulx is a wonderful writer but I was not as enthralled with this book as I had expected. I would have liked more information on the process and decisions that led to the design of this massive house. I felt that much of the design for the house was based on snap decisions and not environmentally...more
Julie
Loved "The Shipping News" by the same author. She's wonderful with descriptions. However, this book had too much global warming bullcrap for my taste. Loved the last chapter about the eagles but it wasn't enough to save the entire experience. A quick read of a day for me.
Liz
I'm not sure what I was expecting from this book, but I enjoyed it immensely. I had read some reader reviews on Goodreads and was a little dubious about the book. However, as I read on I felt that it really presents the basis for the novels that I've read of Proulx's. Her novels create an amazing atmosphere, probably especially for a Brit brought up on westerns on TV. The depiction of the wide spaces and huge skies of the places she writes about,and the characters she creates always remind me of...more
Colleen Clark
I picked this up on the remainder piles at my favorite bookstore. I've enjoyed several of Proulx's novels.

"Bird Cloud" is both wonderfully and maddeningly discursive. And given that it is essentially about a very specific place it's very difficult to identify the exact location. I used a road atlas map of Wyoming for basic orientation while I was reading. But just now I tried to get from Saratoga, WY to "Bird Cloud" exactly and am not sure I was entirely successful using the satellite images fro...more
Barbara Bryant
This was a potentially favorite book that fell short for me--it started as a story of Annie Proulx, whose writing I have liked in a couple of books, finding a piece of land in Wyoming (she calls it Bird Cloud after seeing a cloud formation there) and hoping to build The House, the dream place where she will base the rest of her life. I was really caught up in the spirit of exploration, finding a team to work with, choosing the site, planning the style, the walls, the floors--everything. It becam...more
Brandi
I wanted to read this book because I thought it might give me a sense of the land in that part of the country. With a visit to Yellowstone soon, I was expecting more about the land and wildlife and interactions. The best part of the book is near the end when she describes the birds and wildlife, their comings and goings. However, I couldn't help but think that it was just about someone building an extravagant house in an area where nature should be left to itself. There were parts that bored the...more
Sheila
Cross Bill Bryson’s At Home with Jane Kirkpatrick’s Homestead and you’ll have something like Annie Proulx’s memoir, Bird Cloud. The Bird Cloud of the title is a beautiful home in a beautiful location, but the book investigates the whole concept of home and home-building, starting with the many places the author has lived and ending, nicely, with the many migratory homes of birds.

A similar parallelism continues throughout the book. The author’s quest for her family’s roots, searching through fami...more
Diane
Proulx may be a Pulitzer-prize winning fiction writer, but this autobiographical work won't win any prizes from me. First of all, it is boring. Deathly boring. Autobiographies, of course, use the first person a lot, but Proulx writes as if every detail is precious. Every floor tile as she builds her house. Every mistake she made in choosing other houses. Then she launches into the natural settings of her swamp area home with a textbook-like analysis of the lodgepole pines. Proulx is not a nature...more
Abby Powell
Don't bother reading this book!

I love Annie Proulx's other books and have always enjoyed her writing. When I saw this memoir and it's subject, I thought I might be in for a treat. However, I was met by a long ramble about building a very expensive and particular house in a beautiful area surrounded by nature.

Much of the tone of the book is whining about contractors, architects, etc. all the while going into excruciating detail that quit frankly most people wouldn't care about unless it was thei...more
Glenn
Mixed feelings about this book, which is NOT a memoir, but a chronicle of Proulx's quest for what she hoped would be her dream home in the Wyoming backcountry, named Bird Cloud. Proulx is a master of prose, and her descriptions of Wyoming nature are lyrical. No argument there. But as noted by other readers, Proulx fails to flesh out the people in her story, especially the brothers who built the home and allowed her survive in a land that would otherwise have overwhelmed her limited practical ski...more
TheGirlBytheSeaofCortez
American author Annie Proulx is best known for her 1993 novel, The Shipping News, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and her 1997 short story, “Brokeback Mountain,” about forbidden cowboy love, which was made into a critically acclaimed movie. Her latest book, a work of non-fiction titled Bird Cloud is subtitled A Memoir, though once the reader really gets into it, he or she wonders if “memoir” is the right word to use.

Most readers associate a memoir with deep personal...more
Nancy Hildebrandt
Every time I write a long and thoughtful review, Goodreads seems to find a way to lose it before it's saved. So a shorter review.

I have many similarities to the author's experience. I bought 480 acres in a remote location, but with an existing "shack" that I wanted to restore to its former glory--and so I did, after four years and three contractors. Every time I shook my head at some of the decisions that Proulx made, I have to remind myself that I am a far different person now, having had my ow...more
Pam Lindholm-levy
I read a couple of reviews of this book criticizing Proulx for not fleshing out some of the people we meet, especially the brothers who built her Wyoming home, Bird Cloud. Yes, much of this book is a chronology of finding and buying the land, then planning and building the house. She writes lyrically about the birds, the animals, the sky, the snow, but not about personalities. I guess that's just her.
As a sometime visitor to Wyoming, I could feel the wind, see the snow coming in sideways, know w...more
Jenny Shank
http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/01/...

Annie Proulx tells of her vivid life on a 'Cloud'
Posted Thursday, Jan. 27, 2011 0 Comments Print Share Share Reprints

By Jenny Shank

Special to the Star-Telegram

If there's any writer with a life and mind intriguing enough to merit a memoir, it's Annie Proulx, who didn't publish her first book of fiction until she was in her 50s, then quickly won just about every award available to an American writer. Proulx's geographical-chameleon nature is unusual for a wr...more
Myckyee

On the inside of this book, the title is accompanied by the words ‘a memoir’. Unless I’m completely wrong about the meaning of the word ‘memoir’ I think that that is somewhat of a misnomer.

Bird Cloud is a collection of essays loosely connected by themes of home. Annie Proulx gives a recounting of her own place on earth via her genealogy. That section was just skimmed over with not much detail. She relayed what information she had, but that was given to her by someone she hired to track it down....more
Renee Thompson
In reviewing Annie Proulx’s BIRD CLOUD, I couldn’t decide whether to give it three stars, or four; it wasn’t a five-star read – that, I’ve reserved for BAD DIRT, her collection of fine short stories – but three stars seemed stingy and rude. Besides, I enjoyed it more than that. But to be honest, I was bored on occasion with the discussion of history and archaeology of the region, preferring Proulx’s description of landscape and antics of the birds (she’s an amateur naturalist and an avid and kno...more
Judith Hannan
The second star in this rating is out of respect for Proulx. This book is such a disappointment from a wonderful author. Using the experience of building a house in Wyoming, Bird Cloud reads not much differently than a high school textbook--part family lineage, part geological survey, part Native American history, and part a dissertation on the characters that hunted, farmed, and stripped Wyoming of its natural attributes. The greatest problem is that Bird Cloud tells no story, or it starts a s...more
Bookmarks Magazine
Part memoir, part nature journal, part history, and part construction journal, Bird Cloud is, as the Boston Globe sums up, "a strange, disjointed, often beautiful book." The first point many critics commented on was its curious timing given the foreclosure crisis. "There is a whiff of unexamined privilege" throughout, notes the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and most did not disagree. Yet whether in good taste or bad, that wasn't the main point of contention. Reviewers generally agreed that Proulx is...more
Snotchocheez
There are some professional actors whose work I totally admire, yet I'd care not a whit to spend two minutes together with them in "the real world" to get to know them. Their art and talent can stay ensconced on the big screen, their real life personae can stay forever cloaked behind their Beverly Hills mansions or Aspen megalithic chalets. After reading "Bird Cloud", Proulx' "memoir" revolving around her acquisition of 640 acres of land in Wyoming and her experiences in building a house on that...more
Bonnie

This is a long rambling book about the creation of the author's home in Wyoming. The story of the home's construction would have been a good book by itself, but Annie Proulx embellishes it with many meandering detours along the way. One side trip is to Annie's earliest memories and her many homes as she grew up. And, along the way, the family genealogy. The reader learns the lore of the area surrounding Bird Cloud, as she named the site of the nascent house. The history includes neighboring ranc...more
Jerry Nechal
I finally made it through this book after the third try. I listened to the CD version driving to work after running out of other listening options. I, like a lot of others, was intrigued by the author writing about building a home in remote Wyoming and reading her descriptions of the surrounding landscape. Proulx is a gifted writer, but like others, when she turns to biographical nonfiction this is definitely not her genre. The book opens in a very unappealing way with a long a boring chapter on...more
Bettie
Mar 04, 2011 Bettie rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Brazilliant Laura and R4 listeners
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Michael
While Proulx's incorporation of family history and the story of the Native Americans who inhabited her property long before Europeans journeyed to America is insightful and interesting, her hyper-neurotic tendencies concerning the design and decoration of her new home reveal her to be something of a batty social climber who is more concerned with the color of the floor in her kitchen than most anything else. Bird Cloud ends with a nice bit of bird-watching narrative, but otherwise is kind of a t...more
Yolanda
Annie Proulx has written a memoir all surrounding a house she had built in a wild area of Wyoming. The first chapter tells of her family's background, and the next several chapter describe, in detail, all she went through, and all the people she hired to help her build her house went through to get it done. An amazing process and it got a bit tedious. I listened to this book on CD and I thought for a while that I was glad I wasn't actually reading it off the page. However, the last few chapters...more
Spider
I quit this audio experience on the 7th & final CD, about 4 tracks in. Ugh- I just couldn't take any more. It was an interesting idea about experiences & a place I wanted to know more about made uninteresting by the telling. It was disappointing. It was dull. There was much we might have learned about about injustice to Indians, about the deaths of birds & animals, & environmental degradation, but the information was presented in a jaded & judgmental way- it left me dispirit...more
Katie
While I really like Annie Proulx' fiction, this description of her geneology, her home and land and the history of them went on and on...no point, no theme, no conclusion. Bird Cloud is the name she gives to the Wyoming land she bought from the Nature Conservancy upon which she builds her supposedly perfect house. The book follows her version of the history of the land and its original inhabitants as well as her story of the design and construction of the home. Meh. She does have the ability to...more
Bdalton
This book is made of up multiple stories about the land that Annie Proulx buys in Wyoming. When she first spies the property a cloud in the form of a bird hovers over all - thus the estate is named Bird Cloud. Proulx writes about finding the land, building her architect designed home, the animals and birds on the property, the geography and geology, and the people who came before her in this part of Wyoming. Proulx writes beautifully and most of the book was enjoyable because of her sense of pla...more
Jannekb
I have loved Proulx's writing, cherished it in fact, for many years. "Bird Cloud" is far and away my least favorite book of hers, and it was such an unpleasant read it has tarnished my fine memories of her other excellent works of fiction. To discover what an arrogant know-it-all she is, and to try to sympathize with her struggles in building a lavish dream home, is horribly difficult. She seems to be aware that she is not a completely likable person, but the person I barely met in this non-memo...more
RH Walters
Bird Cloud is a deceptively airy title for a book full of disappointments, abrupt calamities, mistakes and hard American history. Proulx layers the history of her piece of property with the process of imagining and building her house with both heroic and incompetent help; the history of the railroad and ranchers who denuded the landscape and the natives who were its previous occupants; geology; local happenings; and the cycles of bird life she witnesses over several seasons. She doesn’t have kin...more
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Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place (ebook)
Bird Cloud: A Memoir (Audio CD)
Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place (Paperback)
Bird Cloud (Hardcover)
Bird Cloud

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Also published as E. Annie Proulx
Edna Annie Proulx is an American journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. Brokeback Mountain received massive c...more
More about E. Annie Proulx...
The Shipping News Brokeback Mountain: Now a Major Motion Picture Close Range Accordion Crimes Postcards

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“Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on.” 1 person liked it
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