Book review: Better Living Through Birding

For me, this is one of those books where you’re almost sad that you finished it, because that means it’s over.

The topics were so varied – family struggles, gay self-acceptance, the comic book industry, trysts, spirituality, aging parents, Yeats – all, of course, tied together with birds and hints of Star Trek. Very fun to read, as well touching and insightful.

Beautiful descriptions and contemplations on birds, birding, and how it enriches your life in major ways. Birding is truly something that you can carry with you throughout your whole life, as Cooper demonstrates over six decades.^[1]

All in all, the vibes were perfect for me.

Quotes

Maybe you’ll find youreslf atop a cliff in Hawaii, listening to the honks of Nenes and realizing how the sound is so reminiscent of the ubiquitous Canda Geese back home; the close kinship of the two different geese stops being an abstraction, but rather something you can see and hear. You start to percieve the world as an interconnected ebb and flow of genes that take one gorgeous form in one given location, but have drifted in a new direction someplace else. Yet for a moment all that is forgotten, as a flock of Nenes careens overhead and slits the sky with cries of their own, answering the two newcomers, as if to say, “Welcome to our world.”

People hate whom they have. In humankind’s pathetic need to group ientify by treating a different group as “other,” we turn to what’s in proximity for our villains.

Religion is poetry, trading in metaphors that convey truth that isn’t literal but remains deeply meaningful to those to whom it speaks. To everyone else, it’s gibberish. It can be worse than pointless to yammer away at each other in our different religious “languages.”

Only a fool bemoans lost beauty while still in beauty’s embrace, just of another sort.