Diary of a Left-Handed Bird Watcher [Hardcover]

Leonard Nathan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1996

prose/memoirs

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Poet Nathan, who took up the hobby late in life, here ponders on the physical and philosophical aspects of birdwatching as he argues with an ornithologist friend about the meaning of epiphany. With a group of experienced birdwatchers, he spends hours in a Manitoba swamp waiting to see the small and secretive Yellow Rail; on another outing, he seeks the elusive snow bunting. Frequently, Nathan spends hours under wretched conditions only to glimpse the blur of a wing. He dreams about birds and longs to compile an anthology of poems about them. Birders at any level will enjoy his account of field trips, and more serious thinkers will appreciate his commentary on the basic nature of birdwatching.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

While not geared to the average chickadee-loving bird watcher, this title will be appreciated by readers who love both birds and poetry. Nathan, a noted poet, has compiled essays on his passion: finding the elusive snow bunting. He muses in conversations with his wife, his ornithologist friend Lewis, and his Thursday Group of fellow birders on the idea of epiphany. Nathan longs for the "heart-stirring sensation that goes with a clear vivid vision of a bird" and the immediate realization that something special has manifested itself in finding a much-longed-for quarry. Liberally sprinkled with quotations on birds from well-known poets and philosophers and with his own poems, Nathan's book has added a needed dimension to the now popular pastime and even passion of birding. For natural history and literary collections.?Phyllis Pope Bofferding, Hennepin Cty. Lib., Minnetonka, Minn.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 145 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (September 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555972500
• ISBN-13: 978-1555972509
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,798,862 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poet's prose "diary" is a marvelous hybrid., January 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher (Harvest Book) (Paperback)

Jim Schley, South Strafford VT: Leonard Nathan is the author of nine fabulous collections of poems, and the book here reviewed is a hybrid, written in prose, neither fiction nor nonfiction precisely. I use the term "precisely" on purpose, because Nathan's work is replete with exact connections and combinations, images and phrases that defy passing quickly over.

In design and presentation, Nathan's new book is beautiful and compact. In plot, his meta-fictional [ital] Diary is oblique, left-handed in more ways than one, built up like a montage of ruminative passages such as those in a personal diary. One ostensible purpose of Nathan's "entries" is to record the excursions of Thursday's Children, an otherwise unaffiliated gang of aspiring naturalists who gather once a week to carpool to promising sites with their field guides and binoculars. The narrator - a version of Nathan himself, bookworm and unabashed amateur - insists upon the distinction between the serendipitous [ital] birdwatcher and the more zealous [ital] birder, who is "more hunter than looker-on, more passionate about having seen than seeing," and whose Life List is paramount. Nathan playfully interlaces in these pages accounts of hilarious field-trips (grown men and women piling into cars to hurry somewhere because someone has reported sighting), snatches of dreams, poems from various writers, and meditations upon the allure of finally seeing - really [ital] seeing - an elusive exemplar, the snow bunting, which he believes he's only glimpsed once from the edge of an eye. Running through the other diary entries is a series of conversations between poet and scientist, in this case an ornithologist who scornfully questions the idea that an artist could make any genuinely useful contribution to comprehension of the avian world. Our poet is bewildered by the scientist's rebuttals, and he repeatedly tries to reformulate a precept that the scientist will accept. This philosophical confrontation is fierce and grand, even as the genuine friendship of these two men of contrary sensibilities is insightfully dramatized.

I cannot recommend [ital] Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher more delightedly. This is one of the most unusual and evocative books of prose I've read in a long while, as likely to please lovers of poetry as devotees of superb nature writing.

I'm impressed that my own group of friends in New England has become avid for birdwatching. Many of these are people who formerly lived seasonally in different houses, renting or house-sitting or even tenting, and who now have children and homes they've built. We've grown more alert to the other residents of our territory. The activities of the birds around us, arriving and nesting, mating and feeding and fledging then moving on in the fall, keep coming up in conversations as we pass on the sidewalk or in the aisles of a store - the first vireo heard, or last warbler; an unexpected glimpse of a scarlet tanager; the enormous gray goshawk on a maple bough.

In Genesis, Adam undertakes responsibility for assigning a name to each creature in existence, and ever since, poets have defended their task as comparably essential. In actual practice, even poets as skilled as Nathan are less likely to invent than refresh - using the shared vocabulary of our working-day language, to show all over again how bracingly words plunge us not [ital] out of but [ital] into what Denise Levertov calls the life around us. If the aim of scientific taxonomy is to be exhaustive, comprehensive, categorical, and discriminating, the aim of poetic rendering is to crisscross and blend. These are different but complementary modes of precision.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars bird watchers bible, October 27, 2002

A Kid's Review

This review is from: Diary of a Left-Handed Bird Watcher (Hardcover)

My grandfather has made a stunning book and it truely lets the reader see his deep passion for bird watching and his religious meaning to this hobbie. He captures real passion and makes this book a must have for birdwatchers everywhere.

5.0 out of 5 stars Quirky but deep, September 1, 2011

By 

Carny Asada "reading rainbow" (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher (Harvest Book) (Paperback)

This book is "about" birdwatching in the same sense that Moby Dick is "about" whaling. It's not a how-to book, and some of the history and folk tales that Nathan weaves into his narrative might not be strictly factual. But what does ring true are his anecdotes about the odd, obsessive nature of birdwatchers. What's the significance of keeping a life list? Why would someone stand for hours in a freezing field for a momentary glimpse of a couple of ounces of feather and bone? The writing is lyrical and poetic, and a certain kind of birdwatcher might find it boring. But more than any book I've read in the past 20 years, this one has stuck with me.