Parrot Culture: Our 2500-Year-Long Fascination with the World's Most Talkative Bird [Hardcover]

Bruce Thomas Boehrer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 19, 2004

After completing his conquest of the Persian empire, Alexander the Great maneuvered his army across the Hindu Kush and into India. During his two years there, he traveled from dry frigid mountains to humid tropical lowlands and then back across one of the most punishing deserts on the planet. He fought a series of desperate battles against strange foes mounted on war-elephants, suffering wounds that nearly killed him. And when he eventually turned homeward, he brought with him specimens of a rare, magical species, a bird that could speak with a human voice.

Introduced to Europe by Alexander, parrots were quickly embraced by Western culture as exotic and astonishing, full of marvelous powers, and close to the gods. Over the centuries they would become objects of veneration or figures of folly, creatures prized for their wit—or their place on the dinner table. Ultimately, they would become emblematic of the West's interaction with the world at large. Identifying a deeply rooted obsession with these beautiful and loquacious birds, Bruce Thomas Boehrer provides the first account of parrots and their impact on the Western world.

Parrot Culture: Our 2500-Year-Long Fascination with the World's Most Talkative Bird traces the unusual history of parrots from their introduction in the Graeco-Roman world as items of oriental luxury, through the great age of New World exploration, to the contemporary ecological crisis of globalism. Boehrer identifies the poignant irony in the way parrots became ubiquitous as symbols and mascots, while suffering near extinction at the hands of those who desired them. Exploring their presence and meanings in the art, literature, and history of Western civilization, Parrot Culture also celebrates the beauty, intelligence, and personality of these birds, whose fate will say as much about us and the world we have created as it will about them.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Alexander the Great, in addition to conquering much of the known world, is also credited with introducing parrots to Western society. Europeans, and by extension much of the European-influenced world, have been fascinated ever since by these intelligent birds that can mimic human speech. In tracing the relationship between human and parrot, Boehrer, an English professor and parrot fancier, examines the influence of psittacines on all levels of society. Parrots have the distinction--"or the misfortune," as the author puts it--of being the first live animals exported from the New World. As the birds became more familiar to Europeans, they began to enter the vernacular in the form of statuary, painting, poetry, and even jokes. Parrots have always been popular as pets, and interwoven with the discussion of parrots as symbols is Boehrer's analysis of our obsession with owning parrots, which has directly led to their decline. This amalgam of art, natural history, and literature will find a ready audience among the legions of bird aficionados. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"As both a fiction writer and a lover of parrots, I was delighted and enlightened by Parrot Culture. This is an enchanting book."—Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"The book is written by that most rare and wonderful of specimens—an academic whose obsession with parrots is disciplined by his knowledge and love of literature."—Literary Review

"Boehrer has a knowledge base that spans science, art, and literature, and the writing is delightful. The book is fascinating."—Joanna Burger, author of The Parrot Who Owns Me

"Engrossing. . . . Bruce Thomas Boehrer concentrates his well-stocked mind on what over the centuries we humans have done to, and done with, parrots."—Times Literary Supplement

"In tracing the relationship between human and parrot, Boehrer, an English professor and parrot fancier, examines the influence of psittacines on all levels of society. Parrots have always been popular as pets, and interwoven with the discussion of parrots as symbols is Boehrer's analysis of our obsession with owning parrots, which has directly led to their decline. This amalgam of art, natural history, and literature will find a ready audience among the legions of bird aficionados."—Booklist

"Smart, lively and informative. . . . Boehrer's abiding love for these birds is sure to win some converts. . . This is an enjoyable, eloquent paean to all things psittacine."—Washington Times

"Parrot Culture celebrates the beauty, intelligence, and personally of these birds."—BirdTimes

"An endlessly surprising account."—ForeWord

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (May 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812237935
• ISBN-13: 978-0812237931
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,867,887 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Such great potential..., December 26, 2006

By 

Rachel B. Vekseth (Norway) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Parrot Culture: Our 2500-Year-Long Fascination with the World's Most Talkative Bird (Hardcover)

I was very excited when I bought this book. After reading it once, I still found it quite wonderful, but since I`m writing a book of my own (on african greys), I had to check up on some of the "facts" I wanted to use myself. I`m sorry to say that some of the historical facts don`t add up to other, reliable sources. For instance, one painting is dated to 1889, but the painter died in 1883, and according to the book it was the French who invaded The Canary islands in 1402. It was the Spanish... A few other dates are wrong as well. I haven`t found (or searched for) many errors, but this makes me question the rest of the book as well. But if you`re not really "hung up" on historical accuracy, this is a very good book indeed. The facts themselves still hold water, although some dates and such may be wrong.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Of mice, men and parrots, July 5, 2008

By 

Ashtar Command "Seeker" (Stockholm, Sweden) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Parrot Culture: Our 2500-Year-Long Fascination with the World's Most Talkative Bird (Hardcover)

Bruce Thomas Boehrer is both a literature professor and a parrot lover. This makes him eminently qualified to write a book about the cultural impact of parrots on Western art, literature and imagination. Frankly, I assumed Boehrer was British, and was surprised to learn that he's a professor in Florida who spent part of his childhood in El Paso, Texas! Somehow, his knowledge of world literature and his writing skills sound more...well, European. Or am I just being prejudiced? His revulsion to animal cruelty in general and psittacophagy in particular also sound very British.

Boehrer's book "Parrot culture" isn't the easiest read around. Often, it does sound like a college lecture in literature, and the author even ventures into the risky world of art criticism. Yet, somehow it never becomes *really* boring, perhaps because of the subject-matter. Parrots, after all, are intrinsically interesting: exotic, common, intelligent and stupid, all at the same time, in a bewildering combination. As a kid, one of my best friends had an assortment of budgies ("parakeets"), and I remember thinking that they were really silly, since they couldn't talk. The quiet hyacinth macaw in the local pet store I considered even sillier, since it didn't even scream! And what is a parrot that can't talk, or scream, if not redundant? So much for my scientific objectivity...

But on to the book. The first European to describe parrots was a certain Ktesias of Cnidus around 398 BC. Ktesias had seen Indian parrots in Persia, and correctly described their ability to mimic human speech: "It talks like a man in Indian, but if taught Greek can talk in Greek also". Few people, if any, believed him. It wasn't until the conquests of Alexander the Great that parrots became more widely known in the Greek world. We even know what species Alexander sent back to Greece: the Alexandrine parakeet. Aristotle described the bird, and the rest is history.

Boehrer then describes how European cultures viewed the parrot, and how these notions changed. The Greco-Roman world saw parrots in many different ways: as a symbol of inferior humans, as comic relief, as near-divine. During the Middle Ages, few parrots reached Europe, and yet the parrot became an important religious symbol, associated with the Virgin Mary, the Garden of Eden, or God himself. During the Renaissance, the parrot was secularized and turned into an object of ridicule and spite. In Baroque art, the parrot becomes a symbol for native lands to be colonized, or simply a luxurious accessorie, and in Early Modern plays, parrots once again symbolize social and racial inferiority. Being compared to a parrot becomes an insult.

During the 19th century, the parrot was often a symbol of the sentimental, and pet parrots became increasingly popular. Boehrer also believes that a morbid fascination with dead animals characterized the period, and his verbal execution of the great naturalist and bird-painter Audubon is particularly entertaining (and very British).

The last chapter of the book takes us into the modern world. The author interviews environmental activists, writes about his own fascination with parrots, and even talks to a parrot smuggler! The smuggler was apparently imprisoned for trying to smuggle a couple of Australian parrots to the US, all the while the Australian government is busy exterminating thousands of parrots themselves. Who is most absurd, the human or the parrot, one wonders?

Amazon has coupled this book with Richard Verdi's "The Parrot in Art", a good choice in my opinion. Verdi's book is really an exhibition catalogue, and while the text is much shorter than Boehrer's book, the paintings are reproduced in full color (Boehrer's book shows some of the same paintings, but in black-and-white, and smaller size). Thus, the two books nicely complement each other.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Parrot Culture: Our 2500Year-Long Fascination with the World's Most Talkative Bird, June 8, 2009

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Allison Mcgill - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Parrot Culture: Our 2500-Year-Long Fascination with the World's Most Talkative Bird (Hardcover)

There is much information in this book, history, physiology of parrots, social observations of human cultures not only with parrots but in general. Not only informs, it encourages the reader to think, consider values and choices. I had no idea parrots had been around so long or so many famous people involved with them. Not always to the parrots benefit.I also enjoy the author's style of writing; understandable, humorous, and educational. A book that could be read several times and learn something new each time.