Book Reviews

Jonathan Rosen’s Life of the Skies is a wide-ranging and often brilliant exploration of the relationship between humans, birds, and the worlds of nature and culture in a way that birders will find convincing and non-birders truly eye-opening.
The breadth of topics covered here—from Ivory-billed Woodpeckers to Robert Frost, from sex-determined brain function to Sufi mysticism—is […]

There are people who are famous, and people who deserve to be famous; Kenn Kaufman fits into both categories, and like most birders in North America, I look forward to reading everything from his pen, from serious identification articles to light-hearted anecdote. Admirably and enviably, he succeeds as a writer at both extremes; who but […]

Bill Thompson III is well known in North American birding circles, both as the Editor of Bird Watcher’s Digest and as a fine field companion. He is also admirably dedicated, as is his wife, the artist and author Julie Zickefoose, to educating all Americans about their natural heritage. This newest volume in Houghton Mifflin’s […]

Michael put me onto this title while I was planning our Camargue trip, and I can’t recommend it enough: not only does it have a fine set of clearly described itineraries for birding the most important sites (one of which we lifted nearly wholesale for this year’s trip), but this attractively produced book also provides […]

The plates in even the best Neotropical field guides have tended to resemble nothing so much as a crowded museum case, bird after unmoving bird posed on make-believe perches, all facing the same direction, many of them distinguishable only by the discreet numbers keyed to the facing-page captions. The pleasingly painted images by Dana Gardner […]