Word: birdness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Robert Cushman Murphy, 85, expert on oceanic birds and sea-life conservation; in Stony Brook, Long Island. In 1912 Murphy shipped aboard an Antarctic whaler as assistant navigator, and brought back bird, plant and fish specimens never before seen in the U.S. Among the discoveries of his 61-year career were the skeleton of the New Zealand moa, a flightless bird of centuries ago, and the cahow, a sea bird believed to have been extinct since the 17th century. As bird curator at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, he sailed on more than a dozen ocean...
This gleefully savage little novel introduces fiction's most dedicated bird freak since Augie March swept through Mexico with an eagle in tow. George Gattling, an otherwise sober, hardworking owner of an auto-seatcover business in Gainesville, Fla., is determined to train a red-tailed chicken hawk, which he keeps perched on his wrist. Frequently consulting his talismanic text, The Art of Falconry by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, George croons to the hawk, fasts when it fasts, even takes it with him when he goes to bed with his girl friend...
Crews works too hard to make the quasi-symbolic figure of the hawk dominate the book. When the bird is finally trained, Crews' assertion that George has achieved harmony with "some immutable continuity" rings more of rhetoric than of convincing fiction. But much of the time Crews maintains the kind of control that extracts full shock value from an episode while at the same time making it seem hilarious. George's retarded 22-year-old nephew Fred, for example, falls asleep while smoking in his waterbed and somehow manages to drown. · Christopher Porterfield
...signal to foreign tourists (who annually spend about $100 million in Bermuda, three-quarters of the island's income) that all is well. The sun still shines more than 340 days a year, the hibiscus still bloom, and the Bermudian bobby still stands in his elevated bird cage directing the traffic on Hamilton's Front Street...
...resolves to "become like a little child again, a barbarian," a primitive, psychically joining with her father and all the Jungian forefathers. Step by step she regresses into a private wilderness, beyond the last camper's garbage, the last hunter's slaughtered bird, the last echo of the defoliating chain...