"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 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 nineteenth-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.
Bird Cloud, Annie Proulx's first work of nonfiction in twenty years, is subtitled "A Memoir." To many readers who might be hoping for a full-blown, linear account of Proulx's life, this subtitle will be somewhat misleading and possibly disappointing. For careful readers and those with strong, natural curiosity, however, Bird Cloud will be a treasure in which Proulx reveals herself – sometimes directly and other times in more subtle ways. Proulx's memoir is a great example of being shown what a person is about rather than being told what she is like. It is, admittedly, an untraditional way to present a personal memoir, but when examined as a portrait of a specific stretch of time – the building of Proulx's home – the book becomes a beautiful reflection of that period. (Reviewed by Jennifer Dawson Oakes).
New York Times
What Proulx has brought so generously to her Wyoming fiction - an elegiac pursuit of story - she has brought too sparingly to these nonfiction pages.
USA Today Bird Cloud [is] the kind of book that grows on readers.
San Francisco Chronicle
Reading about Proulx's vision of home building, I am reminded of Flannery O'Connor's term, the "habit of art," which refers to the way a good writer approaches everything he or she is responsible for making. It is a process of intuitive selection informed by experience. And just being picky as hell about everything... Bird Cloud is part personal memoir, part construction adventure, part diary about noble animals, but all of it comes together like the ingredients of a glorious meal. The reader is lucky to be invited to her table.
Publishers Weekly
[A] fine evocation of place that becomes a meditation on the importance of a home, however harsh and evanescent.
Library Journal
...When reality confronts dream and one must notice the rocks, stones, sticks, and bones of everyday life, when Proulx relates the history, prehistory, and natural history of the land, that's when this memoir takes wing upon the Wyoming wind.
Booklist
Starred Review. 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.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. 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.
Proulx purchased the square mile of land that she named "Bird Cloud" from The Nature Conservancy, an organization incorporated in the USA in 1951 with a mission to take "direct action" to save threatened natural areas. The non-profit now has a presence in all fifty American states as well as in more than thirty other countries. It is one of the largest non-profit groups in the U.S. with over one million members and, in a 2007 Harris Poll, was shown to be one of the most trusted organizations in America.
It is the goal of The Nature Conservancy to "protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people." The group's approach to conservation is science-based; they will study and analyze what is needed in a given area to ensure the preservation of the local ecosystems, plants and animals. The Nature Conservancy strives for collaborative partnership when working with the people, cultures, and communities where it has a presence. The organization feels this method of fostering strong relationships is important to achieve the goal of enduring...
Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.
Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice.
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(974 words).
New York Times
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