Skip to content
You are not logged in |Login  
     
Limit search to available items
Book Cover
book
BookBook

Title The bedside book of birds : an avian miscellany / [compiled by] Graeme Gibson ; with a new foreword by Margaret Atwood.

Publication Info. Toronto ; New York : Doubleday, [2021]

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Windsor, Main Library - Adult Department  598 BE    Check Shelf
Description xix, 369 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 25 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary "In this stunning assemblage of words and images, novelist and avid birdwatcher Graeme Gibson has crafted an extraordinary tribute to the venerable relationship between humanity and birds. Birds have ever been the symbols of humanity's highest aspirations. As divine messengers, symbols of our yearning for the heavens, or avatars of glorious song and colour, birds have stirred our imaginations from the moment we first looked up into the sky. Whether as the Christian dove, or the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, or in Plato's representation of the human soul growing wings and feathers, religion and philosophy have looked to birds as representatives of our best selves--that part of us not bound to the earth. With the devotion of a birder and hoarder of words, Gibson has spent twenty years collecting the literary and artistic forms our affinity for birds has taken over the centuries. Birds appear again and again in mythology and folk tales and in literature by writers as diverse as Aesop, Shakespeare, Poe, Coleridge, Borges, and Eliot. They've been omens, allegories, disguises and guides; they've been worshipped, eaten, feared, and loved. Nor does Gibson forget the fascination birds hold for science, as the Galapagos finches did for Darwin. Birds appear charmingly and tellingly in the work of such naturalists as W.H. Hudson, Peter Matthiessen, Farley Mowat, and Barry Lopez. So intensely and universally are we drawn to birds, it's small wonder that birdwatching is one of the most popular activities in the English-speaking world. Gorgeously illustrated and woven from centuries of human response to the delights of the feathered tribes, The Bedside Book of Birds is for everyone who is passionate about birds and all they mean to humanity."-- Provided by publisher.
Subject Birds.
Birds -- Literary collections.
Birds in art.
Birds. (OCoLC)fst00832970
Birds in art. (OCoLC)fst00833087
Genre/Form Literature. (OCoLC)fst01921716
Literary collections. (OCoLC)fst01423811
Literature.
Added Author Gibson, Graeme, 1934-2019, editor.
Atwood, Margaret, 1939- writer of foreword.
ISBN 9780385696944 hardcover
0385696949 hardcover
9780385547130 hardcover
0385547137 hardcover
-->
Add a Review