Today, forty-six million Americans are bird-watchers. The Life of the Skies is a genre-bending journey into the meaning of a pursuit born out of the tangled history of industrialization and nature longing. Jonathan Rosen set out on a quest not merely to see birds but to fathom their centrality--historical and literary, spiritual and scientific--to a culture torn between the desire both to conquer and to conserve. The Life of the Skies is at once a history of bird-watching in America, a meditation on changes in our views about killing animals, and a deeply personal book about the transforming qualities of a life spent observing the natural world.