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We are all birdwatchers.
Over cities and jungles and open plains, the sky is animated by the flight of birds, and their presence reminds us of the wild element of life on earth that can never be suppressed. In The Life of the Skies, Jonathan Rosen explores the significance of this timeless pursuit, chronicling his own birding adventures alongside those of John James Audubon, Teddy Rooseevelt, and others. In the process, he discovers the interconnections--literary, philosophical, sceintific, and spiritual--between life on the ground and life up above. Richly researched, lyrically written, The Life of the Skies is "a tribute to the natural world and man's place in it" (Bloomberg News). 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 and lives in New York City. A mixture of memoir, nature writing, history, and philosophy, Jonathan Rosen's The Life of the Skies is a look at the complex relationship humans have with their flying counterparts and a history of America viewed on the wing. Rosen argues that birdwatching is nothing less than the real national pastime. Moreover, it's inextricably linked to our history. John James Audubon arrived in America in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president, and lived long enough to see his friend Samual Morse send a telegraphic message in the 1840s. President Theodore Roosevelt was an avid birder. As a boy, Roosevelt learned taxidermy from a man who had sailed up the Missouri River with Audubon, and yet as president he oversaw America's entry into the twentieth century, a new era in which our ability to destroy ourselves and the natural world were no longer merely metaphorical. Born in the heyday of great sport hunters, Roosevelt died a committed conservationalist. Rosen himself began birdwatching a decade ago, and it changed the way he saw the country and the world. With his characteristic humor and lightly held erudition, he investigates where the manifold interconnections—historical and literary, spiritual and scientific—between human and avian lie. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, nearly 48 million Americans watch birds. Rosen's unique story of watcher and watched illuminates why we are bound to birds, not only by our fears and fantasies but by a complex common destiny. “The Life of the Skies is part birding history, part birding travelogue, centered on Rosen’s regular migration route from his apartment to Central Park . . . with the occasional exotic birding trip. (The descriptions of birding in the Holy Land are particularly beautiful.) . . . It is a thoughtful and engaging journey, one that discusses the history of birding alongside changes in the conception of nature from the 19th century until the present.”—Robert Sullivan, The New York Times Book Review "Jonathan Rosen's voice is the most original . . . The Life of the Skies in indeed unusual in its focus on the watcher as well as the watched. For him, observing nature (and birds are what is left of nature to city-dwellers) corresponds to profound human impulses to restore a sense of kinship with wild creatures, to inspire awe of life and fear of humans' destructive impulses, and to rekindle a religious appreciation of creation. These ruminations are saved from oversolemnity by Rosen's precise erudition, his sense of humor, and a doubt that we can ever 'make the impulses behind birdwatching "explicit." It is an activity that lives in the doing.'"—Robert O. Paxon, The New York Review of Books
"Rosen's prose has a lucid originality, moving easily from the serious to the hilarious . . . The Life of the Skies does not explain bird-watching but holds it up to the light, like a rough gem, to let us catch reflections from its myriad facets one by one."—Kenn Kaufman, The Washington Post
"[Rosen] has a sharp eye for detail and a fund of erudition, and his ruminations on birds—and bired lore, natural history, and the literature of birds—are seductive and wise."—The Wall Street Journal
"The Life of the Skies is part birding history, part birding travelogue, centered on Rosen’s regular migration route from his apartment to Central Park . . . with the occasional exotic birding trip. (The descriptions of birding in the Holy Land are particularly beautiful.) . . . It is a thoughtful and engaging journey, one that discusses the history of birding alongside changes in the conception of nature from the 19th century until the present. There are cameos by Frank Chapman, the banker-turned-birder who created the Christmas Bird Count in 1900; Kenn Kaufman, the Jack Kerouac of birding, who in the ’70s hitchhiked the back roads of America for sightings; and Thoreau, who gets taken down as an antisocial hermit and praised as the inventor of backyard bird-watching. Theodore Roosevelt is Rosen’s hero, partly because he was a books-to-woods president, . . . partly because Rosen sees him as ‘a rare but archetypal creature: an outdoor intellectual.’”—Robert Sullivan, The New York Times Book Review
"Rosen's engagingly crafted report on modern bird watching will not convert anybody who isn't a bird lover, which is fine. Because The Life of the Skies is not pushing a pastime; it is fording the passage of time with binoculars for a torch. In this meditation, winged creatures are but heralds of an equally celestial family: the poets who write about them. This is a book that brings Spinoza, Kafka, Keats and a dozen other men of letters into the first 15 pages to share company with geese, jackdaws and egrets. Birds that feature most prominently do so as feathered totems: Darwin's finch, Whitman's mockingbird, Audubon's parrot . . . Perhaps the most marvelous specimen in his collection is Alfred Russel Wallace, an explorer and scientist who advanced the notion of natural selection before Darwin. This man, though not a poet, 'haunts birdwatching, and should rightfully haunt this book,' writes Rosen, before painting a scene in which Wallace has just arrived in London from the Malay peninsula with two birds of paradise in hand. No bird, and certainly not the exotic beauties so foreign to the halls of Britain's scientific societies, is as plaintive a being as a forgotten man who, in balancing science with spiritualism, became more comfortable with another species than his own. That Rosen recognizes Wallace as the endangered species in this tableau recognizes that Rosen is a poet as well as a birder."—Elizabeth Kiem, San Francisco Chronicle
"A book of exuberant range, of insight and far sight, of trapezes swung for and caught, and now and then a trapeze too far. There are a great many birds in it, avidly watched, but to think of it as about bird-watching is to think of prayer as about steeples. Rosen's is a restless mind with a lyrical and exploring bent. An essayist, novelist and former culture editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, he works on the principle that if you reach a long way and often, your grasp score will be pretty good. His reaches and grasps make connections of all kinds, most especially between the rival poles of sc...
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The Talmud and the Internet, in which Jonathan Rosen examines the contradictions of his inheritance as a modern American and a Jew, is a moving and exhilarating meditation on modern technology and ancient religious impulses. Blending memoir, religious history and literary reflection Rosen explores the remarkable parallels between a page of Talmud and the homepage of a web site, and reflects on the contrasting lives and deaths of his American and European grandmothers.
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