Picking Up The Flute

A Memoir With Music

By: John Elder

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Paperback | 6 May 2016

At a Glance

Paperback
238 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.6 x 1.5

Paperback

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Picking Up the Flute sets to music a former professor's musings on retirement, marriage, literature, and the natural world. From his home in historic Bristol, Vermont to Ireland's Connemara coast, travel through John Elder's exquisite topography and relish his explorations of nature, poetry, and geology.

John Elder's memoir through music is permeated by his unique combination of prose and learning how to play the Irish flute. Elder revisits his time teaching at Middlebury College and explores the next phase of retirement, utilizing texts and memories from his past, whose meanings echo with a new sound now. Picking Up the Flute is an interactive, multimedia memoir that immerses the reader in Elder's provocative prose, while offering the ability to listen to his spirited playing on his website.

Industry Reviews

"Elder is an immensely gifted writer." - Chris Bohjalian, Boston Globe Sunday Magazine -- Boston Globe Sunday Magazine
"In prose as lyrical and spirited as the Irish tunes he plays on his flute, John Elder shows that the autumn of life is a time for letting go of nonessentials and taking up the soul's true worksuch outer work as neighborliness, friendship, maple sugaring, house building, and music making; such inner work as practicing gratitude, rejoicing in beauty, and reflecting on a lifetime of reading and teaching. Above all, he has given us an eloquent story of a marriage, the nearly half-century-long communion of two vivid individuals who constantly renew themselves, and one another, through love." Scott Russell Sanders

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Picking Up The Flute

A Memoir With Music

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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