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The Life of the Skies

The Life of the Skies
By Jonathan Rosen

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Product Description

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.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #398427 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-02-19
  • Released on: 2008-02-19
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 336 pages

Features

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

About the Author

Jonathan Rosen is the author of The Talmud and the Internet and the novels Eve's Apple and Joy Comes in the Morning. His essays have appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is the editorial director of Nextbook.

Customer Reviews

A book for everyone5
"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.

A book for bird watchers and those who care about this planet5
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.

Where the Wild Things Are5
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.