Customer Reviews

The Life of the Skies

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"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.

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.

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.

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

I purchased this book not realising that it was based on Northern American birds. There are some references to birds from around the globe but these are the exception rather than the rule. There is much information to gain from the book in relation to the plight of birds in the Northern American continent, and some excellent illustrations from various sources are included within the text with references listed at the back of the book.
I found the author's (Jonathan Rosen) constant inclusion of religion throughout the text as basically annoying. I also found that at times it was incredibly depressing with the constant referral to hunting and killing of birds throughout history. Rosen does make it clear that he is very much in support of preserving our existing avian diversity, but seems somehow to excuse the hunting and slaughtering of birds as part of man's nature, something that is innate to us all... I find this assumption offensive, and rather patriachal. I am only one person indeed with one view, but I have never had the desire to kill any mammal, reptile, bird or most of the invertebrates with the exception of mosquitos and flies. I am very happy to simply observe their behaviour and marvel at the complexity of our nature world and its ecosystems and inhabitants.
To have such a heavy religous tone throughtout the book without it being hinted at on the sleeve, jacket or abstract overview of the book is, I think misleading.
Despite this criticism, I did find many worthwhile segments which provided me with points important enough to write down in my book of collected information on the world and it's inhabitants.

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.

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.

Some authors are very good at connecting seemingly disparate elements into fascinating narrative. Jonathan Rosen is one such author and in his "The Life of the Birds: Birding at the End of Nature" he has captured the paradox and ambiguity of human involvement in the natural world. Yes we are among the problems (probably the greatest problem) being faced by the environment right now, but we are also part of that environment and sometimes its protector (although never often enough). Paradoxically only modern society allows us to take the time to appreciate "nature."

Rosen is no avid bird lister who tries to reach new heights in chalking up new birds. He is instead a rare bird- the bird watcher who thinks in terms of art, philosophy, religion and history, as well as science. One can, of course, go too far down that road and in the process loose the science, but, from my point of view, Rosen never does this. He instead has produced discussions of birds and bird watching in relation to Audubon, Whitman, Thoreau, Frost, Theodore Roosevelt, E. O. Wilson and many others, weaving the mix into a intricate tapestry that both enriches the birding experience and places it into a human context. His on and off search for the ivory-billed woodpecker is both hopeful and painful and emphasizes the paradox of man (both destroyer and protector) and nature (not always kind itself). In short, it was very easy to read this book, but very hard to put it down. At the end, as in all good books, I was left wanting more!

This is a book to take on a trip on an airplane, bus or train, or to read in bed. Unless you have no interest in the subject at all, you will not be bored.

The Life of the Skies is different if not unique for birding/nature books. This is not about birding but more about why we watch birds or at least why Jonathan Rosen watches birds.

It was a nice break between the scientific books on birds that I normally read. Rosen's writing style is a sort of intellectual and spiritual mix - wonderful! This is the book to take on vacation.

JR takes a drive (listing) and makes it meaningful. The Life of the Skies helped me define my reason for watching birds which seems like a useless activity to many people. He puts birding on a higher level, mixing science, spirituality, and psychology.

Wonderful!

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.