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The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature | 
| Author: Jonathan Rosen
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $10.20
You Save: $4.80 (32%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 297132
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0312428197
Dewey Decimal Number: 598
EAN: 9780312428198
ASIN: 0312428197
Publication Date: December 23, 2008 (In 77 Days)
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Not yet published
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Product Description
A mixture of memoir, nature writing, history, and philosophy, The Life of the Skies is an illuminating look at the complex relationship humans have with their flying counterpart--and a history of America viewed on the wing. An urban birder himself, Rosen roams far from his home birding base of New York's Central Park: searching for the ivory-billed woodpecker in the Louisiana swamp, following Thoreau, Audubon, and Teddy Roosevelt on their own historic birdwatching adventures; and discovering in the skies an intersection between science, history, and faith. Exhilarating, hopeful and wise, The Life of the Skies is "a tribute to the natural world and man's place in it" (Bloomberg News).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Much more than birds September 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Jonathan Rosen's book The Life of the Skies has been given little publicity and is not easy to find simply because it does not fit into the usual categories. It is not a nature book per se. It is not a biography. Rather it is about nature, about philosophy, about reflections on life in general. It is one of those large books that makes one think and reflect on life. Rosen writes well and draws from a wide range of sources, linking birdwatching in Central Park in New York City of all places to a huge number of other topics. It is a book that I came upon totally by chance. I heard a review of it somewhere and decided to go and find it and was amazed that no bookstore had it in stock. I have now passed it on to a number of friends, all of whom say that they have never heard of it. I would highly recommend it to almost anyone, regardless of whether they are a birder or not. Maybe it will convince them, like Rosen himself, to begin to watch birds and in turn to look at the earth that we live on in a new and different way.
 How each generation comes up with its own magic August 17, 2008
It's not many bird books where a story of the Baal Shem Tov (18th century Jewish Mystic) is interspersed with Walden, and Frost's "The Oven Bird". Along with birding trips to Central Park, the southern U.S. to look for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and Israel, Jonathan Rosen, gives us insight into our relationship with nature. Rosen has unique perspectives on Audubon, Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Robert Frost, Teddy Roosevelt, and clergyman/naturalist Henry Baker Tristram. Rosen's insights seem most clear, when following a specific historic story line, such as Alfred Russell Wallace's search for a bird of paradise (which to him was more important that his proposals of evolution). Perhaps the book sputters when Rosen does not have a historic narrative, such as on the difference of Male and Female brain. Rosen " offers no grand synthesis" on many topics (science and religion, hunting, poetry) but the book works well at presenting a blend of philosophy, history, literary reference, and birds.
A book for bird watchers and those who care about this planet April 27, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
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.
Good sources April 5, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 March 31, 2008
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
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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