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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Top Flight!,
By
This review is from: Diary of a Pigeon Watcher (Paperback)
This is a wonderful, numinous autobiography. No matter how sane or how eccentric your own life has been, you will find things to identify with in Schwerin's reach back into the matrix of her family.
She interweaves her reminiscences and her search for her roots with the family history in the making that is taking place on the window ledge opposite her New York apartment. Not to mix bird species, but a family of pigeons goes through a Lonesome Dove-style saga of struggles and triumphs out there on the windswept plains of that ledge as Schwerin is writing. Schwerin draws tacit parallels between her own chronicle and that of the pigeons. There are the subtle ways in which a mother will sometimes defend and sometimes be strangely oblivious to a child's aspirations. There's the hostility of outsiders to contend with. As the pigeon family battles the physical assaults of burlier, more aggressive pigeons and of unsympathetic humans in adjoining apartments - so Schwerin recalls her family's coping with being one of the few Jewish families in the Boston suburb where she grew up. In the course of making these two histories the woof and warp of a larger study of life, Schwerin does often lapse into purple prose. Take for example her transports of gratitude at being chosen to compose music for stagings of the works of some of America's most important playwrights - "Eugene O'Neill, passionate, rhapsodic, victim of loss and too much love, maker of deep song from the stinging damp and cold of his inner and outer voyages. I understood his cry for clarification, and the sun in his throat..." That's laying it on a little thick. But at other times, her prose truly does become poetry, as when she describes her mother's funeral - "Oh bastard day, embroidered with black umbrellas! How like a proud cat you brought me a dead mother and laid her at my feet." You will probably come away from this book with a new appreciation of pigeons, of the struggles they undertake that go way beyond the dictates of instinct. And you will probably also come away with a new appreciation of the struggles your forefathers went through to bring you to this point. This book deserves to be more currently popular. First published in 1976, it seems to have largely fallen off the radar screen. So it probably won't be on most bookstore shelves now. But it will be worth your while to hunt (and peck) for it, and buy it wherever you can find it.
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