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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.

I love Cat Sebastian books. This is a historical romance set in a time period that I don’t often see – 1950s.

Nick is a gay man who has never known an out and happy gay relationship. He doesn’t think that that is a possibility for him. When he is drawn to Andy, he doesn’t want to acknowledge it because he doesn’t see a future. Andy also get engaged to a mutual friend who then breaks up with him. Quote:

"He’s so wrapped up in Nick that he almost forgets his own troubles, until one of Nick’s aunts points a fork at him and turns to the man sitting beside her. “His girlfriend left him for a heart doctor.” So now she speaks English?

The man looks appraisingly at Andy and shrugs. “A heart doctor, though,” he says in a tone that suggests that getting jilted in favor of cardiologists is all anyone can expect. That maybe Andy should have considered medical school if he didn’t want to get jilted. That Emily did what she had to do, because who could turn down a heart doctor?"

Nick and Andy get closer as Andy deals with the fallout of the breakup. Gradually they find other gay men and lesbians around them to serve as models for what a happy life can look like.

The book does a good job of depicting the fear of being found to be gay in the 1950s. Jobs weren’t safe. Violence and police harassment were the norm. How do you build a life in that environment?

I love this author’s dialogue.

Quote:

“There now,” Andy says, smoothing a Band-Aid across Nick’s temple, the pads of his fingers gentle. “Good as new.”

“Thanks,” Nick says, his voice a little rough. “Jorgensen would have let me bleed out.”

“Who gave you the first aid kit, you pair of ingrates?” the editor shouts.

“Back in his day they didn’t have Band-Aids,” Nick continues. “They just slapped mud on their wounds and went back to drawing the news on the walls of their caves.”

“I can still hear you,” Jorgensen says.

“It’s nice when the elderly keep their hearing,” Andy observes.

One of the recurring themes in the book is that in the media of the time, there were no happy endings for gay people. Nick has never read a book where the gay person didn’t die. He is given a book by a gay editor but he refuses to read another depressing book. Everyone tries to convince him that it isn’t like that. Quote:

"Anyway, the book ends up with one couple happily together. Not ecstatically happy, mind you, but England’s being blitzed, so that’s a factor."

This is a great love story with amazing period details. I rated this at 5 stars which I don’t do often. Definitely read this one.

I had requested this book from the library but I didn’t remember what it was about. Every time it showed up on my ipad I sent it back and asked for it to be delivered later. Then I saw it start to show up on Best Of lists. The next time it appeared in my library app, I decided to give it a try.

This book definitely lives up to the hype.

It reminded me a lot of Babel. A girl is taken into a school that is run by a colonial power. She is trying to hold on to her identity and culture while learning what the other people have to teach her.

“And the Anglish have the nerve to call my people savage and wild and all that nonsense, when they can’t think of any better way to solve a fight than to kill one another over it?”

She isn’t the only indigenous person in her school. There is a boy who was raised in white society after the death of his parents. He has been shunned by the other students for being indigenous but isn’t willing to find out more about his background because of his own internalized racism.

This book covers the first year of her schooling. I love how determined she is to be fully herself in the face of the disapproval of the rich people in her school.

“There wasn’t any corn, which seemed practically blasphemous for any kind of celebration in October, but the Anglish could be very strange.”

I also liked the fact that this book upends a common YA fantasy trope. There is a bit of a love triangle. In this case though, Anequs decides to handle this by intending to marry them both. She hasn’t told her love interests that yet though.

I’m looking forward to reading the next installment.