Heather reviewed Better Living Through Birding by Christian Cooper
Review
4 stars
Christian Cooper became instantly famous when he filmed a woman in Central park who refused to put a leash on her dog. Her threat to call the police and tell them that an African-American man was threatening her made the incident go viral.
That story is probably one of the least interesting things about Christian Cooper.
He is a gay, Black, nerd who went to Harvard and then worked for Marvel when that was considered to be a dead end job. (His grandmother would tell people that he was still smart when they found out that he worked in comics.) He was an activist who worked with GLAAD when it was founded. He was raised going to civil rights marches. And through it all he was a birder.
This book is part memoir, part travelogue of his birding adventures, part introduction to the world of birding.
He has a TV …
Christian Cooper became instantly famous when he filmed a woman in Central park who refused to put a leash on her dog. Her threat to call the police and tell them that an African-American man was threatening her made the incident go viral.
That story is probably one of the least interesting things about Christian Cooper.
He is a gay, Black, nerd who went to Harvard and then worked for Marvel when that was considered to be a dead end job. (His grandmother would tell people that he was still smart when they found out that he worked in comics.) He was an activist who worked with GLAAD when it was founded. He was raised going to civil rights marches. And through it all he was a birder.
This book is part memoir, part travelogue of his birding adventures, part introduction to the world of birding.
He has a TV show now on the National Geographic Channel called Extraordinary Birder. We started watching it online as I was reading this book. You can find it on Hulu and Disney Plus. He is super goofy on the show. He's a bit more raunchy in this book. (His mental gymnastics to figure out if it was ethical to sleep with a white South African right after the fall of Apartheid are beautiful.) He's very funny. At one point he was in charge of going through unsolicited submissions for Marvel.
"Special mention is reserved for the guy who took the trouble to write, draw, and actually print in finished form a sample issue of his original superhero creation, complete with cover art:
It followed a teen burdened with fantastic powers and his pair of pals in a suburban high school, all of it unremarkable, until they’re menaced in the wrong part of town by glowering thugs. The thugs, of course, were Black; the hero, his friends, in fact everyone else in the story, was white. I desperately wanted to attach a Polaroid of myself to the rejection letter, but I refrained."
Even if you aren't particularly interested in birds, read this one for the story of growing up different from your community and finding a way to thrive not in spite of it but because of it.