The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature [Hardcover]

Jonathan Rosen (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 19, 2008

Aerial delights: A history of America as seen through the eyes of a bird-watcher

 

John James Audubon arrived in America in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president, and lived long enough to see his friend Samuel Morse send a telegraphic message from his house in New York City in the 1840s. As a boy, Teddy Roosevelt learned taxidermy from a man who had sailed up the Missouri River with Audubon, and yet as president presided over America’s entry into the twentieth century, in which our ability to destroy ourselves and the natural world was no longer metaphorical. Roosevelt, an avid birder, was born a hunter and died a conservationist.

Today, forty-six million Americans are bird-watchers. The Life of the Skies is a genre-bending journey into the meaning of a pursuit born out of the tangled history of industrialization and nature longing. Jonathan Rosen set out on a quest not merely to see birds but to fathom their centrality—historical and literary, spiritual and scientific—to a culture torn between the desire both to conquer and to conserve.

Rosen argues that bird-watching is nothing less than the real national pastime—indeed it is more than that, because the field of play is the earth itself. We are the players and the spectators, and the outcome—since bird and watcher are intimately connected—is literally a matter of life and death.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this eloquent book, Rosen—a novelist and editorial director of Nextbook, which promotes Jewish culture and literature—meditates on the fact that technology enables us to preserve wildlife and at the same time contributes to its demise. He laments that no sooner had he discovered bird-watching than he realized that nature has become a diminished thing, as Robert Frost put it in his poem The Oven Bird. Everywhere he looks—from a Louisiana swamp to the Israeli desert—he finds a paradox: we are attempting to preserve nature at the same time that we are destroying it. Cars, trains and planes, Rosen writes, have enabled us to find the birds of America for ourselves, even as these inventions have contributed to the fragmentation that endangers them.Birds sing back to us an aspect of ourselves, Rosen says, harking back to Audubon, and he confesses that this is why he came to bird-watching, making it even more poignant that so many birds are close to disappearing forever. Rosen's wide-ranging intellect (he is also the author of The Talmud and the Internet) flits gracefully from nature to history to poetry, and gentle meditations can be spiked with barbs ( 'Collecting' is the ornithological euphemism for killing). This beautifully written book is an elegy to the human condition at a time when wilderness is becoming a thing of the past. Illus. (Feb.)
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Review

“Life of the Skies is more than just a bird book. It is a thoughtful and often unexpected exploration of birding through the lens of history, literature and loss—the process, as author Jonathan Rosen says, of loving a diminished but still seductive world.” —Scott Weidensaul, author of Living on the Wind and Of a Feather

 

“Birding is so much more than just outdoor recreation. Its sources are woven into history and legend, and its pleasures are ultimately spiritual. Jonathan Rosen has captured all this to deliver a rare and beautiful piece of literature.” —Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, and Honorary Curator in Entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology

 

“I can scarcely tell a scarlet tanager from Scarlett O’Hara, but The Life of the Skies had me transfixed from the first page. Rosen writes with astounding insight, wit, and compassion. The story he tells here is the best kind of odyssey, an outward journey that ends up highlighting the beauty and daring that live inside of us.” —Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics

 

“Entertaining and compelling, full of natural wonders and wonderful story-telling. In this unshowy, profound, engaging book, Rosen uses attention to birds— the only wild creatures most of us ever see, as he points out— as an occasion to meditate on art and wilderness, science and impulse, human nature and the nature of our precarious world.” —Robert Pinsky

“Like millions of people, I take a curious pleasure in staring at birds, but never knew why. Thanks to The Life of the Skies, I now realize that I am not just indulging a compulsion to classify. In this illuminating and charming book, Rosen shows us the poetry, the philosophy, and the history—natural and human—of the strange modern pastime of bird-watching. You’ll never a see a waxwing in the same way again.”  —Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor, Harvard University, and author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Stuff of Thought

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (February 19, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374186308
• ISBN-13: 978-0374186302
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,069,671 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A book for everyone March 5, 2008

By Foodie69

Format:Hardcover

"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.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A book for bird watchers and those who care about this planet April 27, 2008

By ShiraSongbird

Format:Hardcover

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.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Much more than birds September 9, 2008

By M. J. Riley

Format:Hardcover

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.