Customer Reviews

Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia

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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.

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.

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!

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.

Louisa Waugh went to live in a village in western Mongolia, to teach English, where she learned more than she thought she would. She learned about religion, lush summers, dusts storms, hard winters, loneliness, fear, happiness, yummy horse meat and dealing with death. For all the information in the book it reads pretty swiftly and I finished it within a couple of days, when not working, sleeping or eating. It really is a hard book to put down and a lovely one to add to my library of Asian books. I really felt sorry for her sometimes.

This is a book by a woman, who goes to Mongolia, discovers how much she likes the country and then goes back to it years later, lives there for two years, then teaches in a remote village of nomads. the book is about her time spent in the village of nomads teaching them English. she describes life in the village and the people there and how it was for a foriegner, who grew up in London, to be totally surrounded by such a foreign and alien environment. very good read. i highly recommend it.

could not put book down... really helped to understand 'the mongolian way'..... a keeper!

British teacher Louisa Waugh one day decides she needs to break out of her mundane London life, and accepts an invitation to spend a year teaching the children of the outer Mongolian plains. Leaving her materialistic world of computers, Ipods, cell phones and espresso machines behind, Louisa eagerly anticipates a unique experience as she lands in Mongolia's capital city of Ulaanbaatar. She first spends a few months getting her feet wet and her body acclimatized in this city, making friends and learning the language before flying out to the steppe, the arid sparse desert-like terrain of the village of Tsengel.

Arriving with just a few backpacks of personal items, Louisa is quickly & surprisingly welcomed into the family fold of some of the most generous, kind, and happy people that exist on this planet. This is the 4th book I've read about the warm and jovial Mongolian people, and it remains consistent through all that I've read about them, that they love all visitors to their land, and believe in sharing and caring for anyone that shows up knocking at their door. Minutes after her arrival she is welcomed with open arms by the town priest, and shown to her own ger, a nomadic canvas tent that might not look like much on the outside, but can be lavishly decorated with thick carpets, comfy furniture and a warm stove for heating and cooking on the inside. Unpacking her meager belongings of a few changes of clothes, cases of toilet paper, stacks of books and emergency medicine, Louisa falls in love with these smiling practical people who literally live day by day in survival mode with next to nothing to call their own, yet spend each night laughing, cooking, eating and drinking after their daily chores are done. Every act of daily life is spent working together, all efforts a joint teamwork experience. In some ways, while reading of Louisa's stay in Tsengel, the life style reminded me of the communal Amish experience.

Life is harsh on the Mongolian plains, the men are hard working shepherds that prize their flocks of sheep, goats, camels and horses; their only means of survival for food, drink, and warm clothing. Louisa's stomach rebels on a diet of mutton, horsemeat, marmot and butter salted tea, and finds the weekly slaughter of animals a heart-wrenching affair that causes her much turmoil. Weather is severe, frigid winters have you up at dawn to crack the ice in your buckets to get water to drink, no running faucets here. Trench-style outhouses for bathrooms slick with ice can have you skating to the loo in the middle of the night to pee, and skinning marmot pelts and sheering sheep for cashmere and felt are back breaking jobs when it's below zero and one hasn't much food or sustenance to keep the body fat and warm. The luxury of electricity is absent, only a few community buildings are wired for it, and even then it is only turned on between 6 and 9PM in the winter hours. This is a land without luxury yet Louisa finds it appealing.

Reading and teaching by candlelight and woodstove fires are the norm, as Louisa spends her year learning the gifts of love, friendship and family. She finds the joys of solitude and calmness amidst people that come to love her as their own. Birthing babies, burying the dead, battling bubonic plague, birthday celebrations & weddings rituals, weekend jaunts to the disco, and learning how to distill vodka are just some of the thrills of the Mongolian nomad life. Observing the sport of hunting with eagles while horseback riding in the mountains has Louisa enthralled with this precious country and wondering if she will ever be able to return to the hustle and bustle of London, when all she wants to do is sit on the Mongolian plain where it is so quiet you can hear the birds fly.

This a sensational memoir of a courageous woman with the spirit of adventure as she learns how spoiled, greedy and closed minded most of the world is, and how she became a new woman with a whole new attitude on life after spending the best year of her life in another world on the other side of the globe.

I loved this book. I am traveling to Mongolia next year, and so am interested in reading as much as I can about the country and its people. The author truly brings us into life there, and through her experiences and friendships is able to help us understand not only what life is like in this harsh country, but to understand the people, as well. I appreciated the fact that she was totally honest in describing her feelings and what she went through for the year in Tsengel.
Since the last review here is three years ago, I hope that more people are able to read this book. It really brings a remote country closer to home.

This memoir is a great read. The author tells her story in a way that keeps your interest and at the same time, I don't want the book to end. I bought the book because it is about Mongolia - a place I plan to visit next year; and it's written by a woman, and helps convey what it's like to experience the country as a woman; the interactions and friendships able to make; and the extent to which a woman can move about freely and safely.