The life of the skies
By: Jonathan Rosen
Edition: 1st Picador ed.
Publisher: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9780312428198
Copyright date: 2008
Subjects: Bird watching; Anecdotes
Description: 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. The Life of the Skies is at once a history of bird-watching in America, a meditation on changes in our views about killing animals, and a deeply personal book about the transforming qualities of a life spent observing the natural world.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 301-320).
Table of contents: title: Backyard birds; title: Birds of paradise.