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Birds Art Life
- A Year of Observation
- Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow
- Length: 4 hrs and 50 mins
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Publisher's Summary
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.
When it comes to birds, Kyo Maclear isn't seeking the exotic. Rather she discovers joy in the seasonal birds that find their way into view in city parks and harbors, along eaves and on wires. In a world that values big and fast, Maclear looks to the small, the steady, the slow accumulations of knowledge, and the lulls that leave room for contemplation.
A distilled, crystal-like companion to H is for Hawk, Birds Art Life celebrates the particular madness of chasing after birds in the urban environment and explores what happens when the core lessons of birding are applied to other aspects of art and life. Moving with ease between the granular and the grand, peering into the inner landscape as much as the outer one, this is a deeply personal year-long inquiry into big themes: love, waiting, regrets, endings. If Birds Art Life was sprung from Maclear's sense of disconnection, her passions faltering under the strain of daily existence, this book is ultimately about the value of reconnection - and how the act of seeking engagement and beauty in small ways can lead us to discover our most satisfying and meaningful lives.
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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
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Performance
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Story
- Sara
- 12-10-17
A Year In The Life
I really enjoyed this throughly engaging bio written over the course of one year. Maclear has broad interests and a discerning eye for the small detail and at the same time the big picture. Several times while listening I scrambled to click the bookmark on my device to save a thought or idea. To me, Maclear's use of vocabulary was excellent and her skilled phrasing of an insight really hit the mark and captured the essence of a problem or issue. In short, the author was able to put complex ideas into words beautifully and convey them to the reader with simple ease.
I've read several reviews that found this book was very like the book H is for Hawk. I am not sure I agree with that thinking. While both books were written by a woman, contemplative in nature and involved birds as a vehicle for exploring life, they were very different books. H is for Hawk was a dark, solitary and brooding meditation that focused on, for the most part one bird, Mable, a hawk the author was training. This was an up close relationship with one bird.
In Birds Art Life Maclear is a very busy, relatively upbeat mother of young children with a husband, lots of activities and yoga classes. She was writing about exploring birds by shadowing a birder for a year. This involved learning about lots of different birds, usually observed from a distance. In reality these were very different books with extremely disparate outlooks on life, loss and our individual place in the world.
Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed both of these books very much. Just don't go into this book looking for more of Helen Macdonald. This is 100 percent Maclear and stands well on its own. Perfect for a reader who wants to learn to expand their connection with nature and glean some of the author's thoughts on living in a complex world.
17 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Kay Gerfers
- 02-09-22
Not Recommended
I got this book because the opening was used as an example in a memoir class I am taking. Now that I’ve finished the book I can’t even remember the beginning. After the journey boring and tedious journey through the book I’m not sure I want to remember. The author uses lists a lot. Reading a written book that might be ok but in an audio book it makes for a very difficult listen. She also simply stated conclusions without sharing what might have been a compelling or moving story that resulted in the conclusion. There was so little emotion expressed in this book that I wondered why she wrote it. The performance was much better than the book deserved.
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meditation on the 'other' side of life
- By Audy Meadow Davison LMT on 09-05-16
By: Rebecca Solnit
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The Faraway Nearby
- By: Rebecca Solnit
- Narrated by: Rebecca Solnit
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In this exquisitely written new audiobook by the author of A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories - of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness - Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other stories.
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Great Book - Author shouldn't read it
- By S. Earle on 02-29-16
By: Rebecca Solnit
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Walking
- One Step at a Time
- By: Erling Kagge, Becky L. Crook - translator
- Narrated by: Atli Gunnarsson
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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A lyrical account of an activity that is essential for our sanity, equilibrium, and well-being, from the author of Silence.
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A delightful and essential book
- By Yogans on 05-02-19
By: Erling Kagge, and others
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Pure Colour
- A Novel
- By: Sheila Heti
- Narrated by: Sheila Heti
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her.
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Nothing else like it
- By Teri Kline on 03-20-22
By: Sheila Heti
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Dog Years
- By: Mark Doty
- Narrated by: Mark Doty
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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When Mark Doty went looking to adopt a small dog, a cuddly creature who might comfort his terminally ill partner, Wally Roberts, he was surprised to find himself returning home from an animal shelter with a full-grown golden retriever, a dog whose "absolute openess of regard", and paw gently offered through the bars of a cage, proved irresistable to him.
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I cried my face off
- By Brad on 10-27-08
By: Mark Doty
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One Native Life
- By: Richard Wagamese
- Narrated by: Christian Baskous
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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One Native Life is a look back down the road Richard Wagamese has traveled - from childhood abuse to adult alcoholism - in reclaiming his identity. It's about what he has learned as a human being, a man, and an Ojibway in his 52 years on Earth. Whether he's writing about playing baseball, running away with the circus, making bannock, or attending a sacred bundle ceremony, these are stories told in a healing spirit. Through them, Wagamese reveals to listeners how to appreciate life for the journey it is.
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Don’t Normally do this
- By Amber on 03-16-21
By: Richard Wagamese
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Journal of a Solitude
- By: May Sarton
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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May Sarton's parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her "real" life - not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude - both an exhilarating and terrifying state.
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Perfect!
- By Kathryn on 08-07-20
By: May Sarton
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Will's Red Coat
- The Story of One Old Dog Who Chose to Live Again
- By: Tom Ryan
- Narrated by: Tom Ryan
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawn by an online post, Tom Ryan adopted Will, a frightened, deaf, and mostly blind elderly dog, and brought him home to live with him and Atticus. The only owners Will ever knew had grown too fragile to take care of themselves or of him. Ultimately Will was left at a kill shelter in New Jersey. Tom hoped to give Will a place to die with dignity amid the rustic beauty of the White Mountains of his New Hampshire home. But when Will bites him numerous times and acts out in violent displays, Tom realizes he is in for a challenge.
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Wildflowers And Drunken Butterfly Dances
- By Gillian on 05-06-17
By: Tom Ryan
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Farther Away
- Essays
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Jonathan Franzen, Scott Shepherd
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him.
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Two different readers, two different experiences
- By Doggy Bird on 03-31-13
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Hourglass
- Time, Memory, Marriage
- By: Dani Shapiro
- Narrated by: Dani Shapiro
- Length: 3 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time - abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning - a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.
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Great Synthesis of Memoir meets Philisophy
- By Carolyn M. Kell on 05-08-17
By: Dani Shapiro
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Lost & Found
- A Memoir
- By: Kathryn Schulz
- Narrated by: Kathryn Schulz
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father—a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee—went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief.
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Bored to death
- By Amazon Customer on 03-15-22
By: Kathryn Schulz
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Paris in the Present Tense
- By: Mark Helprin
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life, with its days bright with music, family, and rowing on the Seine, Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist who is a third his age.
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Greatest living "novelist". Top 10 narrator.
- By BellevueMike on 10-14-17
By: Mark Helprin
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Warlight
- A Novel
- By: Michael Ondaatje
- Narrated by: Steve West
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself - shadowed and luminous at once - we follow the story of 14-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war.
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It both entertains and teaches.
- By Kelly on 07-28-18
By: Michael Ondaatje