Vesper Flights
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Narrated by:
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Helen Macdonald
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By:
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Helen Macdonald
About this listen
Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves.
In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing the massive migration of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk’s poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds’ nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife.
By one of this century’s most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us.
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Legendary author and essayist E. B. White writes, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." Covering a large number of subjects, this classic collection features 31 of White's most memorable essays.
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E.B. White writes honestly, fearlessly and clearly
- By Bonny on 09-03-17
By: E. B. White
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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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Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
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Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
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Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
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The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
- By: Elisabeth Tova Bailey
- Narrated by: Renee Raudman
- Length: 3 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Elisabeth Tova Bailey tells the intimate and inspiring story of her year-long encounter with a snail. While an illness keeps her bedridden, she becomes an astute and amused observer of the snail's surprising nocturnal adventures as it lives in a flowerpot on her nightstand. Intrigued by the snail’s clear decision making abilities, hydraulic locomotion, mysterious courtship, and molluscan anatomy, Bailey takes the listener deep into the life of this tiny amazing animal. With wit and grace, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating recounts a remarkable journey of human and gastropod survival and resilience, and shows how the natural world illuminates our own human existence. Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Nonfiction, the John Burrough Medal Award for Natural History, and a National Outdoor Book Award. If you enjoyed Wesley the Owl, The Guest Cat, and Marley & Me, you'll enjoy this unique interspecies audiobook listen.
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This is an unexpected wonder. The quiet virtues of the snail reflect the quiet voyage of the author.
- By Frances on 08-03-15
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The Art of Travel
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Aside from love, few actvities seem to promise us as much happiness as going traveling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs, and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel, few people seem to talk about why we should go and how we can become more fulfilled by doing so.
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Dull, suggestions for better alternatives
- By J. Natael on 08-07-13
By: Alain de Botton
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Ring of Bright Water
- By: Gavin Maxwell
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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'Ring of Bright Water' represents Gavin Maxwell's account of his life at Camusfearna, a remote cottage in the western Highlands, and in particular the two otters, Mijbil and Edal, who became his constant and much-loved companions.
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A Kindness to Creatures Great and Small
- By Sariah on 01-19-18
By: Gavin Maxwell
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Almost Anywhere
- Road-Trip Ruminations on Love, Nature, Recovery, and Nonsense
- By: Krista Schlyer
- Narrated by: Marisa Vitali
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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What do you do when your world ends? At 28 years old, Krista Schlyer sold almost everything she owned and packed the rest of it in a station wagon bound for the American wild. Her two best friends joined her - one a grumpy, grieving introvert, the other a feisty dog - and together they sought out every national park, historic site, forest, and wilderness they could get to before their money ran out or their minds gave in.
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No a travelogue - its a diary
- By Jonathan on 12-29-20
By: Krista Schlyer
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The Wonder of Birds
- What They Tell Us About Ourselves, the World, and a Better Future
- By: Jim Robbins
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Birds, Jim Robbins posits, are our most vital connection to nature. They compel us to look to the skies, both literally and metaphorically, draw us out into nature to seek their beauty, and let us experience vicariously what it is like to be weightless. Birds have helped us in so many of our human endeavors: learning to fly, providing clothing and food, and helping us better understand the human brain and body.
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Stories about birds with something for everyone
- By D on 07-24-17
By: Jim Robbins
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Walden
- Life in the Woods
- By: Henry David Thoreau
- Narrated by: Alec Sand
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Thoreau's classic account of the solitary life, describing his attempts to simplify his life and sort out his priorities by living alone in a cabin beside Walden Pond for nearly two years, is one of the most influential books ever written. The bible of the environmental movement, Walden vividly portrays Thoreau's reverence for nature, and his understanding of the idea that nature is made up of crucially interrelated parts.
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Excellent book and narration
- By Kindle Customer on 06-14-11
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Wild Ones
- A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America
- By: Jon Mooallem
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America’s endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Jon Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it.
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The line between conservation and domestication...
- By Bonny on 04-02-14
By: Jon Mooallem
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What listeners say about Vesper Flights
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- LORETTA LIBBY ATKINS
- 06-16-24
Her well written prose
Loved the English accent and beautifully described birds and their habits. McDonald gathers the most salient details - very satisfying
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- Sheffield
- 10-07-21
Beautiful Reflections
Love this collection. Helen Macdonald is such a marvelous writer and narrator. Can't imagine listening to her words spoken by anyone else. Tremendously honest, heartfelt, and funny. Every reflection has something about it - large or small - that's moving. A great companion for long walks. Looking forward to her next work.
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- Victoria Cofield-Aber
- 05-02-22
Insightful,funny,thought-provoking
Absolutely fantastic. Opens your senses to the snimal world in a very different way highlighting how we share this planet and how important it is to value the earth and its inhabitants. We are all sojourners here and have our own purpose. Excellent comparisons within the context of our lived socioeconomicpolitical experiences and our stewardship of the earth and all of its inhabitants.
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- Dorianne
- 06-05-24
Learning about our world
The writing and the lovely reading of Vesper Flights is making me more conscious and curious of the communities of all animals in which we live.
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- Jeff Koeppen
- 04-08-23
Excellent Collection of Nature Essays
After listening to Helen MacDonald’s excellent book H is for Hawk in 2016 I immediately added Vesper Flights to my TBR list and I finally got around to it. Unlike H is for Hawk, which is about her life with her goshawk Mabel, this book is a series of 41 nature essays which covers a wide variety of topics but primarily are about birds. I again listened in Audible. She has a great voice and her narration is excellent, and really adds to the book especially when she tugs at your emotions.
It seems like she’s been everywhere and has had encounters with a wide variety of beasts. She is British so we learn a lot of the issues faced on the island regarding the struggles of wildlife, birds in particular. But her travels took her all over the world and she seems to have a story for every location.
Some of my favorite essays were: her experience with an ostrich at a farm she worked at as a young person, the tale of Menesh the stork accused of being a spy and "arrested", the rise and fall of orioles in Great Britain, experiences with goats, the story of the arrow-stork, watching bird migration from the top of the Empire State Building, the effects of the 9-11 light beams on birds, and the tradition of swan upping. There are also chapters with interesting information about nests, swifts, wild pigs, mushrooms, cuckoos, berries, and a ton of other subjects. She also veers away from nature at times, writing about her migraines and her friend Nathalie Cabrol, a French NASA astrobiologist who studies lakes on Mars.
Some of the chapters inspire awe and some leave you with a lump in your throat and all you can say is “wow”. Great examples of this are her conclusion to the chapter Nests where she waxes poetically about an unhatched bird as she watches its shadow move around inside its egg and how it will someday rule the skies over our heads, and the whole final chapter What Animals Taught Me where she puts our relationship with nature in perspective. I think she's a great writer and she is the person you want to go on a hike in the woods with.
Like any collection, some topics held my interest more than others but overall this was excellent and listening to the brilliant author read her own words really added to the experience.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Cath
- 10-13-21
Stupendous.
Extraordinary. Exquisite. Profound. Macdonald puts into precise words her authentic experiences of herself and the natural world. She also is a gifted audio narrator with a deep and lilting voice.
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- Mama Lee
- 08-30-23
A wonderful book!
I read the authors book H is for Hawk a few years ago and enjoyed immensely and this book of essays was just as good if not better. Bravo!
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- Cherilyn Parsons
- 12-31-20
Total delight - do get this book!
What a pleasure to dip and soar through these reflections on nature, animals, birds, perception, love, grief, and so much more. Each essay was quite different, but the overall collection was knit together beautifully. The language was stunning (Helen is also a poet). And humor was everywhere! A further pleasure: the author reading the book. Her voice with its gentle accent made the experience of listening to it feel all the more personal. She’s a gracious, self-deprecating, and very funny person.
This is a perfect book for enhancing your own experience of engaging with the natural world. The essay form allows you to dip into bits of writing, ideal for calming down at the end of the day or taking a break.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Pecky Woodpecker
- 08-19-21
The best narrator
This is my second Helen Macdonald audible. Frankly, I think I am as entranced by her performance as I am by her writing. She is simply a magnificent narrator. I hope she will always read her own work.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Secutor
- 11-09-20
Pure delight
Reading the title essay, printed in the NYT before the book's publication, I was floored by the beauty, depth, and clarity of Macdonald's writing. The rest of the book was equally impressive, and made richer by the author's pitch-perfect reading.
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8 people found this helpful