The Life of the Skies

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 336 pages
• Published by: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Edition: 1st Edition February 19, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0374186308
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0374186302
• Book Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Weighs: 14.4 ounces

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 gorgeously 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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Product 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 gorgeous 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

Reader Reviews
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.