Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

Christian Cooper

When birdwatching in New York's most famous park one morning in May 2020, Christian Cooper was engaged in the ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old. But when a routine encounter with a dog walker devolved into a tense racial confrontation, Cooper's video of the incident would spark a firestorm at a moment when America's conscience on race was awakening.

In Better Living Through Birding, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.

Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, this is Cooper's story of learning to claim and defend space for himself and others like him, from his days at Marvel Comics introducing the first gay storylines to vivid and life-changing birding expeditions through Africa, Australia, the Americas, and the Himalayas.

Better Living Through Birding recounts Cooper's journey through the wonderful world of birds and what they can teach us about life, if only we would look and listen. 288 pages.

Hardback £23.00 £18.99