A book for bird watchers and those who care about this planet

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	• The Life of the Skies Jonathan Rosen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A book for bird watchers and those who care about this planet

I often get a book from our local library and then decide after reading it or reading part of it whether or not to purchase the book. This is definitely a book to purchase. It has a vast amount of information written in a poetic and beautiful manner. One reviewer wrote about a few grammatical errors. That person certainly lost the point of the book which was to make you appreciate nature and life in general.

This is a fascinating book but also hard to describe. Rosen writes about so many things besides birding.
(Birding is serious birdwatching). He brings in some Jewish content in his book and a few chapters are about birding in Israel.

Rosen also spends quite a bit of time writing about birding in Central Park in NY City and looking for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker in Arkansas. There are many quotes in the book from various poets and writers and early American birders such as Audubon and many others.

Here is a little quote from the end of the book just to give you a little flavor of the writing of Rosen.

" Looking for the Ivory-billed woodpecker, I inevitably found myself jotting in my notebook "I.B. Woodpecker," linking the bird to I. B. Singer, like Sutzkever a great Yiddish writer steeped in loss, obsessed with diminishment and survival. As if the bird I sought kept a culture alive in its song, though it doesn't even sing; it drums and makes a thin tinny ank, a language that remains haunting and obscure.

But birdwatching is a world of small gestures that reflect larger worlds. My favorite place to watch birds in Central Park is Tanner's Spring, a humble little area not even located in the park's wooded interior but just off Central Park West, a hundred yards north of the Diana Ross playground..."

Anyway, I loved the book, being a birdwatcher and a Jew myself.

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An Australian view

I purchased this book not realising that it was based on Northern American birds. There are some references to birds from around the globe but these are the exception rather than the rule. There is much information to gain from the book in relation to the plight of birds in the Northern American continent, and some excellent illustrations from various sources are included within the text with references listed at the back of the book.
I found the author's (Jonathan Rosen) constant inclusion of religion throughout the text as basically annoying. I also found that at times it was incredibly depressing with the constant referral to hunting and killing of birds throughout history. Rosen does make it clear that he is very much in support of preserving our existing avian diversity, but seems somehow to excuse the hunting and slaughtering of birds as part of man's nature, something that is innate to us all... I find this assumption offensive, and rather patriachal. I am only one person indeed with one view, but I have never had the desire to kill any mammal, reptile, bird or most of the invertebrates with the exception of mosquitos and flies. I am very happy to simply observe their behaviour and marvel at the complexity of our nature world and its ecosystems and inhabitants.
To have such a heavy religous tone throughtout the book without it being hinted at on the sleeve, jacket or abstract overview of the book is, I think misleading.
Despite this criticism, I did find many worthwhile segments which provided me with points important enough to write down in my book of collected information on the world and it's inhabitants.

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Good sources

Pro - thoughtful reflections on birdwatching, environmental crisis and parenting
Con - some of it has appeared in the New Yorker and the Times
Very good list of sources, from Emerson to E.O. Wilson.

Where the Wild Things Are

This book spoke to me. I've been a birder for over 20 years now, and after reading "The Life of the Skies" I understand at last why I enjoy it so much.

Author Rosen's central view is that humans need to affiliate with the natural world to be happy and fulfilled: "More and more I realize that to be bored with birds is to be bored with life. I say birds rather than some generic `nature,' because birds are what remain to us." He makes the point that birds are the only truly wild creatures most of us see.

Many of the pages include interesting history. The chapter about the ivory-billed woodpecker describes how after Alexander Wilson, the father of American ornithology, captured one in the 18th century, he noted that its cries sounded exactly like "the violent crying of a young child."

A must for anyone who loves birds, "The Life of the Skies" will make its reader want to go outside and look up.

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reviews: page 1, 2

Aerial delights: A history of America as seen through the eyes of a bird-watcher John James Audubon arrived in America in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president, and lived long enough to see his friend Samuel Morse send a telegraphic message from his house in New York City in the 1840s. As a boy, Teddy Roosevelt learned taxidermy from a man who had sailed up the Missouri River with Audubon, and yet as president presided over America?s entry into the twentieth century, in which our ability to destroy ourselves and the natural world was no longer metaphorical. Roosevelt, an avid birder, was born a hunter and died a conservationist.

Today, forty-six million Americans are bird-watchers. The Life of the Skies is a genre-bending journey into the meaning of a pursuit born out of the tangled history of industrialization and nature longing. Jonathan Rosen set out on a quest not merely to see birds but to fathom their centrality?historical and literary, spiritual and scientific?to a culture torn between the desire both to conquer and to conserve.

Rosen argues that bird-watching is nothing less than the real national pastime?indeed it is more than that, because the field of play is the earth itself. We are the players and the spectators, and the outcome?since bird and watcher are intimately connected?is literally a matter of life and death.

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