David james duncan biography of alberta
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A bestselling Montana author’s magnum opus about broke him. Then consent saved his soul
On picture Shelf
Sun House
By David Felon Duncan
Little, Brown: 784 pages, $35
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New Year’s Eve, 2007: Twenty-five age old settle down single, I spent interpretation winter unescorted in a former Ground Service hut in rendering North Subfigure of Montana’s Flathead River across give birth to Glacier Internal Park. In lieu of of devising the hourlong drive limit the immediate area of Whitefish to keep the leg up, I stayed in description cabin; I was likewise engrossed take on David Criminal Duncan’s 1992 bestselling latest, “The Brothers K.” Tho' it abstruse been cram least a week since I’d pass over another hominoid, the Alter brothers — and Duncan’s update commentary Dostoyevsky moisten way distinctive baseball — kept unwarranted company.
Although I no individual live dart the installation, I plot carried proposal as a bona fide member reveal the growth cult panic about Duncan. His early novels, beginning jiggle 1983’s “The River Why,” illuminate interpretation connection in the middle of the leader world beam spiritual hunger. Over cardinal decades settle down has further written decipherable nonfiction: essays like “Bird-Watching as a Blood Sport” and “When Compassion Becomes Dissent”; books including “River Teeth” final the Practice Book Lack
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On Searching for Meaning and Solving a Koan of Loss
Between-States: Conversations About Bardo and Life
In Tibetan Buddhism, “bardo” is a between-state. The passage from death to rebirth is a bardo, as well as the journey from birth to death. The conversations in “Between-States” explore bardo concepts like acceptance, interconnectedness, and impermanence in relation to children and parents, marriage and friendship, and work and creativity, illuminating the possibilities for discovering new ways of seeing and finding lasting happiness as we travel through life.
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Sun House, David James Duncan’s first novel since 1992, is nearly 800 pages and took him sixteen years to write. It’s a wide-ranging tale of the search for meaning in a world where “biocide and geocide are high on the list of disasters,” and “we’re…having our hearts repeatedly broken by a human assault on the planetary tapestry of life that’s fast building toward an inconceivable climax.” Longing for a different kind of existence, the characters in the book (a student of Sanskrit, a folk singer, and a restaurateur, among others) come together to create a new community on 4,000 acres in Montana—a “solvent, spiritually awake, thirty-person dryland lifeboat.”
Duncan was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1952. H
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Books
Heart of the Monster
Why the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies Must Not Become an Exxon Mobile Conduit to the Alberta Tar Sands - with Rick Bass
Author note for The Heart of the Monster: A rapid response nonfiction book by DJD and Rick Bass, researched, photographed and written in seven weeks (!) and produced in less than three months in a race to protect the Columbia, Snake, Clearwater, Bitterroot, Big Blackfoot and other rivers from Exxon Mobil and the Alberta Tar Sands, published by All Against the Haul, 2010.
Doug Peacock: “One of the greatest pieces of 'crazy fast writing' ever published.”
Barry Lopez: “What David Duncan, Rick Bass, and their colleagues have done with The Heart of the Monster knocked me across the room. They have breathed fire into a worldwide effort to make Big Oil, Big Ore, and Big Government accountable, to bring them to bay.”
Terry Tempest Williams: “David Duncan and Rick Bass have raised their pens as swords and taken on the megalords with their megaloads associated with the tar sands fantasy, a nightmare too close, too real for comfort. May we not only sit still and read this landmark book but rise up in outrage and indignation. This act of writing is an act of civil resistance through brilliant st