[wisb] why I'll definitely read this book

From: "William Mueller" <iltlawas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "wisbirdn" <wisbirdn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:58:31 -0600
Jonathan Rosen's book, The Life of the Skies - Birding at the End of Nature
(published in 2008) has yet to make it to the top of my desk. 
But after reading these reviews (below), now I know I'm certain to read it. 

"The Life of the Skies is part birding history, part birding travelogue,
centered on Rosen?s regular migration route from his apartment to Central
Park . . . with the occasional exotic birding trip. (The descriptions of
birding in the Holy Land are particularly beautiful.) . . .  It is a
thoughtful and engaging journey, one that discusses the history of birding
alongside changes in the conception of nature from the 19th century until
the present. There are cameos by Frank Chapman, the banker-turned-birder
who created the Christmas Bird Count in 1900; Kenn Kaufman, the Jack
Kerouac of birding, who in the ?70s hitchhiked the back roads of America
for sightings; and Thoreau, who gets taken down as an antisocial hermit and
praised as the inventor of backyard bird-watching. Theodore Roosevelt is
Rosen?s hero, partly because he was a books-to-woods president, . . .
partly because Rosen sees him as ?a rare but archetypal creature: an
outdoor intellectual.???Robert Sullivan, The New York Times Book Review

"Rosen's engagingly crafted report on modern  bird watching will not
convert anybody who isn't a bird lover, which is fine. Because The Life of
the Skies is not pushing a pastime; it is fording the passage of time with
binoculars for a torch. In this meditation, winged creatures are but
heralds of an equally celestial family: the poets who write about them.
This is a book that brings Spinoza, Kafka, Keats and a dozen other men of
letters into the first 15 pages to share company with geese, jackdaws and
egrets. Birds that feature most prominently do so as feathered totems:
Darwin's finch, Whitman's mockingbird, Audubon's parrot . . . Perhaps the
most marvelous specimen in his collection is Alfred Russel Wallace, an
explorer and scientist who advanced the notion of natural selection before
Darwin. This man, though not a poet, 'haunts birdwatching, and should
rightfully haunt this book,' writes Rosen, before painting a scene in which
Wallace has just arrived in London from the Malay peninsula with two birds
of paradise in hand. No bird, and certainly not the exotic beauties so
foreign to the halls of Britain's scientific societies, is as plaintive a
being as a forgotten man who, in balancing science with spiritualism,
became more comfortable with another species than his own. That Rosen
recognizes Wallace as the endangered species in this tableau recognizes
that Rosen is a poet as well as a birder."?Elizabeth Kiem, San Francisco
Chronicle



William P. Mueller
Milwaukee
(414) 698-9108
(262) 638-0735
E-mail: iltlawas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Work e-mail: bmueller@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On the web: http://home.earthlink.net/~iltlawas/
Blog: http://bluebirdslaugh.blogspot.com

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[wisb] why I'll definitely read this book

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