
Miracle Country
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Campbell
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By:
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Kendra Atleework
About this listen
Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero.
Kendra's family raised their children to thrive in this harsh landscape, forever at the mercy of wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Most of all, the Atleework children were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. But it came at a price.
When Kendra was six, her mother was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease, and she died when Kendra was 16. Her family fell apart, even as her father tried to keep them together. Kendra took flight from her bereft family, escaping to the enemy city of Los Angeles, and then Minneapolis, land of all trees, no deserts, no droughts, full lakes, water everywhere you look.
But after years of avoiding the pain of her hometown, she realized that she had to go back, that the desert was the only place she could live.
Like Wild, Miracle Country is a story of flight and return, bounty and emptiness, and the true meaning of home. But it also speaks to the ravages of climate change and its permanent destruction of the way of life in one particular town.
©2020 Kendra Atleework (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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The hardscrabble folks of Troublesome Creek have to scrap for everything - everything except books, that is. Thanks to Roosevelt's Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Troublesome's got its very own traveling librarian, Cussy Mary Carter. Cussy's not only a book woman, however, she's also the last of her kind, her skin a shade of blue unlike most anyone else. Not everyone is keen on Cussy's family or the Library Project, and a Blue is often blamed for any whiff of trouble.
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A LOVELY, SAD AND PROFOUND BOOK!
- By Janna Wong Healy on 08-17-19
A reminder of why we love this place
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Note to narrator: It’s not Ne-vah-da...!😉
Someone I’d love to talk and hike with!
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Complicated, Beautiful
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.It will be difficult to find an equal for my next reading )s)
The best book I’ve read in a long time
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Nevada
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So insightful
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The best memoir I've read
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More than anything, though, this book is a story about family and Kendra's unbreakable bond with her family and her home in the Eastern Sierra. It is an especially beautiful and touching tribute to her well deserving father, Robert Atlee.
“(My father) knows his place among what is larger and older than he, and it is knowledge of this role, of a human as something brief and potentially joyful, that he passes to his children, the way another father might pass on a prayer,” Atleework writes.
If you don't read another book this year, or if you add it to your queue, please read this one! It will have a long lasting impact on you I promise!
Best Memoir I have Ever Read - Remarkable!
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The Land and People of The Eastern Sierras
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loved the overall story of the changes in this family
how the water supply was stolen from Owen’s Valley and it changed everything about life there.
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