The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature
Jonathan Rosen. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24 (324pp) ISBN 978-0-374-18630-2
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
Reviewed on: 11/05/2007
Genre: Nonfiction
Open Ebook - 336 pages - 978-1-4299-5603-1
Paperback - 324 pages - 978-0-312-42819-8