Bird

Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America. Anna Davidoff is larger than life in every dimension-a Russian ?migr? from Leningrad in the 1940s, a Hollywood movie star in the 1950s and deeply embedded in the 1960s counter-culture that lead to the Himalayas and her vows as a Buddhist nun. She treats her daughter Ana-Sophia-Az-with the transient intensity of any other episode in her life, and leaves her five-year-old behind when she takes her pilgrimage to Tibet. And when Az grows up she goes searching, following her mother's wandering paths deliberately and by accident. Bird is based in part on the lives of Russian aristocrat "Princess" Zina Rachevsky, who died in 2013, and of the two lamas who founded a monastery with her, Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Around this thread it weaves a world of jazz and poetry of dharma, a series of enlightenments, and a history of the better part of a century. "Cunningham never puts a foot wrong in relating a fabulous story, as unpredictable as it is convincing, as thoughtful as it is absorbing" - The Age