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sophia_sol) wrote2025-01-17 04:48 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2025-01-17 04:48 pm
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World, by Christian Cooper
You may or may not remember the news story of the birder in central park who was confronted by a white woman and threatened with police because he was black, in May 2020. This book is that black birder's memoir.
Overall, a good book, and one I'm glad I read. Christian Cooper is much more than "just" a black man and a birder. He's gay, he's a nerd, he's an activist, he's pagan, he loves travelling, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things are a part of his life and shape who he is and how he reacted in that viral moment.
I really appreciated how he put that central park story near the end of the narrative, contextualising it in the rest of his life -- and then following it with a story about a similar confrontation in the same place just one year later contextualizes it even further. And also, that's not the end of his story. And I love how it ends! Tn the delight of always being able to see something new and learn something more about birds, no matter how long you've been a birder, and always being ready to throw yourself into the moment for it!
I do think the momentum in the book dragged a bit in the middle, plus I found it awkward how he made multiple references earlier in the book to the central park incident that made him famous; it makes the book feel too much of-the-moment, when a lot of what he's saying in this book is that that moment wasn't actually a bizarre outlier in his life as a whole.
But Cooper has led an interesting life, and I enjoyed hearing about it, and learnint about his time working for Marvel comics especially. He was part of the team working on Alpha Flight when the superhero Northstar came out as gay!
I listened to to this book as an audiobook, and Cooper narrates it himself. I like how his enthusiasm comes through in his reading, though whenever he tries put on a voice when doing dialogue for other people, it often comes out sounding loudly exasperated when he's aiming for high energy or high emotion, which is irritating.
One fun thing that the audiobook format allows is that at the beginning of each section of the book, there's an audio clip of birdsong, for a bird species that will be featured in that section of text! I really enjoyed trying to ID the bird from the song and then listening for when it would come up in one of his stories.
Overall, though it's not a perfect book, I am glad I read it and I think it's worth reading.
Overall, a good book, and one I'm glad I read. Christian Cooper is much more than "just" a black man and a birder. He's gay, he's a nerd, he's an activist, he's pagan, he loves travelling, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things are a part of his life and shape who he is and how he reacted in that viral moment.
I really appreciated how he put that central park story near the end of the narrative, contextualising it in the rest of his life -- and then following it with a story about a similar confrontation in the same place just one year later contextualizes it even further. And also, that's not the end of his story. And I love how it ends! Tn the delight of always being able to see something new and learn something more about birds, no matter how long you've been a birder, and always being ready to throw yourself into the moment for it!
I do think the momentum in the book dragged a bit in the middle, plus I found it awkward how he made multiple references earlier in the book to the central park incident that made him famous; it makes the book feel too much of-the-moment, when a lot of what he's saying in this book is that that moment wasn't actually a bizarre outlier in his life as a whole.
But Cooper has led an interesting life, and I enjoyed hearing about it, and learnint about his time working for Marvel comics especially. He was part of the team working on Alpha Flight when the superhero Northstar came out as gay!
I listened to to this book as an audiobook, and Cooper narrates it himself. I like how his enthusiasm comes through in his reading, though whenever he tries put on a voice when doing dialogue for other people, it often comes out sounding loudly exasperated when he's aiming for high energy or high emotion, which is irritating.
One fun thing that the audiobook format allows is that at the beginning of each section of the book, there's an audio clip of birdsong, for a bird species that will be featured in that section of text! I really enjoyed trying to ID the bird from the song and then listening for when it would come up in one of his stories.
Overall, though it's not a perfect book, I am glad I read it and I think it's worth reading.
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Oh thanks -- author-narration is always iffy, but the bird song tips the scales in that direction.
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