- ISBN13: 9780349115801
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
A wonderfully accessible memoir of an inaccessible country: Outer Mongolia.
Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia
Tags: remainder mark, Condition, NEWNotes, Mark, outer mongolia
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Mongolia is the kind of place that captures the imagination. So big, so cold, so remote. I have had the incredible good fortune to travel there myself. Louisa Waugh does an exceptional job of evoking a sense of the remote village where she lived, and the tough, resourceful people who teach her to survive. There are other writers who have done this, but Waugh has captured the spirit of Mongolian women better than any other writer on the subject. This is a marvelous, beautiful book that makes me miss Mongolia all over again.
Rating: 5 / 5
Nice book – for once a travel author who isn’t full of her (him)self and bores us with the difficulties of adaptating to a different culture or who has to show off her/ his magnificent sense of humor. Simple and well written and most importantly captures the magic of the place and its people. Thanks!
Rating: 4 / 5
This book gave me an intense experience of Tsengel, a village of a few thousand on the farthest western edge of Mongolia. I loved spending four seasons there with Louisa Waugh. The author won the first Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize for a work of fiction or non-fiction (this is non-fiction) “evoking the spirit of a place”. Waugh has done this superbly. The reader is there with her so fully because she has added her own joys and hardships of that year in Tsengel without a hint of solipsism. She is a generous woman and a generous author. Reading this boook is a great experience.
Rating: 5 / 5
At the moment I am fascinated by Mongolia so reading online reviews and surfing the web I thought this book to be a must. It actually is! Louisa Waugh is a modern Margaret Mead, she tries living in this remote mongolian village participating to the life, but without interfering and without judging, and when that happens she underlines and regrets it. Can this book be called a work of modern anthropology? It goes near to it. I would have liked a more detailed description of the population and the ethnic differences between the Kazakhs and the Tuvans, but that would have made this book a textbook of social studies, which it really doesn’t want to be. The simplicity and modesty of this unusual life experience is touching. The author talks about herself (very little)and mostly about the other women she meets. The Prize the book won is extremely appropriate because the spirit of the place is really the book’s main character.
Rating: 4 / 5
could not put book down… really helped to understand ‘the mongolian way’….. a keeper!
Rating: 5 / 5
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