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| Author: Jonathan Rosen
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $13.41
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New (28) Used (8) from $13.41
Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 17931
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0374186308
Dewey Decimal Number: 598.0723473
EAN: 9780374186302
ASIN: 0374186308
Publication Date: February 19, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-8 of 8 | | « PREV | | |
 Not as good as I had hoped March 22, 2008
18 out of 24 found this review helpful
Wordy and diffuse, this book often attempts profundity but fails to explore these topics satisfactorily. The author includes pieces reworked from his magazine articles--as well as many, many potted pieces from and about other authors and their works--giving the whole thing an unsatisfying feel. I like the topic very much, and the author has ability. But the whole is more pastiche, sometimes annoyingly self-referential (very much in the modern magazine style), than original essay. It would have been better as a long essay for The New Yorker. As it is, parts seemed repetitive and unnecessarily stretched out and padded. Also, some points seem contradictory and could have been addressed and worked out by a more penetrating author (for example, criticism of Gnosticism at one point, but positive things said about the divine spark in each of us, at another).
Also, I was surprised to find some minor editing errors in a book by an intelligent editor and published by a top New York house. For example, on page 42, I can't figure out how the sentence that begins, "The urge to stalk and kill are murmuring silently in the blood," should be anything other than "The urge to stalk and kill IS murmuring...." Or on page 38: insert "where" after "the places"; right? Or page 54: capitalize "native American"? Minor errors, if errors they are, and nothing to complain about, but surprising in this kind of publication.
I set the bar high for a book that has sold so well and received such high praise. If this book gets more people outside, watching birds, and caring about their planet, it's all to the good. But I think the author is capable of better.
 A book for everyone March 5, 2008
16 out of 20 found this review helpful
"A Life of the Skies" is a beautifully written account of birding, but it's actually about so much more. It's really about being human, and the way we relate to the natural world, how we effect the natural world even as we observe it. I am not a birder myself, but I was captivated by this book from the first page. Jonathan Rosen is a very compelling writer, and this is a perfect book for someone who wants to understand the relationship between modern life and the natural world.
The soul of birding February 29, 2008
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that almost 50 million Americans are bird watchers. We come in all flavors: dudes, ringers, ornithologists, twitchers, feeder keepers. Jonathan Rosen's book tells the story of his becoming a hard-core bird-watcher. Part of his story is funny, seeking nature in the midst of Manhattan. Part of it is much deeper: science and art, faith and metaphysics, and the purely biological nature of birds.
"The urge to watch birds is all but instinctive, dating, no doubt, from a time when knowing the natural world -- what could be eaten and what could eat us, what would heal us and what would bring death -- was essential. It is fed by our urge to know, as strong as our urge to eat. Could you imagine a lion stalking prey not out of hunger but out of curiosity? We name things, we classify them. In the Bible Adam gives names to the natural world, imposing a human order on a chaos of life, a kind of second creation.
"Birdwatching is as human an activity as there can be. We have one foot in the animal kingdom -- where, biologically, we belong -- but one foot in a kingdom of our own devising. As Walt Whitman said of himself, we are 'both in and out of the game / and watching and wondering at it.'"
His reference to Whitman exemplifies how he continually switching between scientific and literary insights. For example, "Poetry, it should be said, can be bad for the environment." He tells the true story of an avid collector who released 60 starlings in a garden in Central Park devoted to the flora and fauna mentioned in Shakespeare. Today, there are an estimated 200 million starlings in the United States. Since they will eat anything, they are unreliably useful for controlling insects, but are are normally considered loud, obnoxious and destructive birds, who steal grain, ravage crops and crowd out native bird species. He adds poetry of his own: "Birds say life life life, but something right alongside them is always whispering death death death," "Birds say life life life, but something right alongside them is always whispering death death death."
Rosen is the author of The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds, in which he argues that the Talmud and the Internet are two great efforts to collect all of the the knowledge in the world. His religious beliefs inform much of his writing in this book. "Birds raise complex questions about belonging, much like Jews. ... We all have to figure out where we belong geographically, but also metaphysically. ... Personally I believe that there is a divine spark in us which binds us to the rest of creation, not merely as fellow creatures, but as caretakers, with an earthly responsibility like the one we imagined for God."
You don't have to be religious to enjoy this book and to learn something important about your love of watching birds. He reflects on Audubon, Thoreau, Roosevelt, Wallace, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost; on ivory bill woodpeckers and birds of paradise, on hunting, falconry, writing, religion and doubt. "While you're civilizing them, they're decivilizing you. By studying birds, you're bringing them into your literary world, but they're bringing you into their natural world."
I moved between the natural and the literary worlds, and thoroughly enjoyed the transitions.
Robert C. Ross 2008
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