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Object Lessons
Bird
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Hope, as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, is the thing with feathers. Erik Anderson, on the other hand, regards our obsession with birds as too sentimental, too precious or romantic. Birds don't express hope. They express themselves. But this tension between the versions of nature that lodge in our minds and the realities that surround us is the central concern of Bird.
This is no field guide. It's something far quirkier and more idiosyncratic, balancing science with story, anatomy with metaphor, habitat with history. Anderson illuminates the dark underbelly of our bird fetish and offers a fresh, alternative vision of one of nature's most beloved objects.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.
Hope, as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, is the thing with feathers. Erik Anderson, on the other hand, regards our obsession with birds as too sentimental, too precious or romantic. Birds don't express hope. They express themselves. But this tension between the versions of nature that lodge in our minds and the realities that surround us is the central concern of Bird.
This is no field guide. It's something far quirkier and more idiosyncratic, balancing science with story, anatomy with metaphor, habitat with history. Anderson illuminates the dark underbelly of our bird fetish and offers a fresh, alternative vision of one of nature's most beloved objects.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.
- GenresNonfiction
160 pages, Paperback
Published March 19, 2020
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65 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 4, 2025
I must be missing something here because I'm the only negative review of this book, but this was straight-up awful.
The Object Lessons books were sold to me as short books each about a particular subject, and I got the books for Birds, Dust, and Air Conditioning, written by someone who has a personal connection to the subject and intertwined with stories and personal reflections as well as information. I tried to read Bird first.
The guy starts the book by saying he doesn't really care about birds. Literally page 2: "Before I go any further, I have a confession to make. I'm not all that interested in birds. It's not that I don't like them. I simply lack the enthusiasm others possess." Hmm, okay, perhaps you are not the best guy to write a book about birds then. That is a pretty important part of writing a book about a subject.
Shortly later he says that he's no more attached to birds "than to the summer chorus of crickets and cicadas. If anything, I'm more attached to the noise, given its soothing constancy." Hey man, maybe you should write a book about bugs then. I bought a book about birds expecting to read some nice things about birds. I feel that this is not unreasonable.
Chapter 2 is then literally called "The Hater's Guide to Birds", a chapter name that Anderson liked so much he reused it for two more chapters later on, out of 7 chapters total. Is he purposefully trying to piss off the audience? Is it meant to be ironic?
These chapters start off with little facts about a certain species of bird and then transition into some loose metaphor that relates this fact to some element of society. These get dumber and dumber as they go on.
The entry for the Andean Cock of the Rock (Rupicola peruvianus) starts off by talking about the noises it makes, a potentially interesting bit of information. But then it veers hard into other subjects. The last sentence on this two-page feature is "Human agency may be something else entirely - in which justice, counter to much evidence, may have a place - but what, then, to make of my squawking?" Hey man, what the fuck are you talking about?
The next chapter talks about a time when the author was out off the coast of Louisiana with some scientists looking for small mollusks in the water. The chapter talks a lot about the other scientists and their philosophies and Louisiana's loss of land to water and all about the little mollusks. Um, okay. Was this meant for the mollusk book?
The tie-in about birds in this chapter is that on the way out, the author thinks he sees a rare bird for a split second, but the others tell him he probably didn't. Then on the way back in, they see a buoy in the water and they realize he actually only saw a buoy and kinda laugh at him. And the author gets on this whole bizarre high horse about how 'maybe the so-called buoy bird is the bird we NEED to see because it's not a real bird, but it's what we want to see' or whatever... which I was thinking must be one of the dumbest things I've ever read in my life, until the author gets to the next section which is 'a year later they called me up and they found out that those types of rare birds ARE around there so I probably DID see the rare bird after all,' then goes on to lament the 'loss' of the 'fake buoy bird' he thought he saw:
"As a new and emblematic figure, I had thought the buoy bird could be playful, the kind of joke that, because it echoes through one's life, resounding through one's foibles and failures, hurts a little. But what I'm left with is more complex than the gag I'd constructed at my own expense."
Okay, now THIS is the dumbest thing I've ever read.
This whole 26-page chapter is just: "Thought I saw a bird. [Intermission: 24 pages about mollusks.] Realized I didn't see a bird. Oh wait actually it was a bird but now I'm sad about it."
The author's writing style is so pretentious and overly-embellished that I think he needs to visit a proctologist, it can't be healthy having one's head stuck so far up one's ass.
The next chapter - again named "The Hater's Guide to Birds" - starts off with an entry for the Himalayan Monal, but accidentally just has three pages of a pointless story about a guy who doesn't speak English going to a museum for free, not understanding any of it, and then crying. Hey uh - what?
This was about the halfway mark through the book, 70 pages or so, and it was at this point I decided the rest of it wasn't worth my time.
The book needed an author who could meet two criteria:
1. Likes birds
2. Good writer
Instead it got someone who didn't like birds, and who was not a good writer. So what we get is a badly-written book that's not really about birds.
In short, a pretty awful book!
The Object Lessons books were sold to me as short books each about a particular subject, and I got the books for Birds, Dust, and Air Conditioning, written by someone who has a personal connection to the subject and intertwined with stories and personal reflections as well as information. I tried to read Bird first.
The guy starts the book by saying he doesn't really care about birds. Literally page 2: "Before I go any further, I have a confession to make. I'm not all that interested in birds. It's not that I don't like them. I simply lack the enthusiasm others possess." Hmm, okay, perhaps you are not the best guy to write a book about birds then. That is a pretty important part of writing a book about a subject.
Shortly later he says that he's no more attached to birds "than to the summer chorus of crickets and cicadas. If anything, I'm more attached to the noise, given its soothing constancy." Hey man, maybe you should write a book about bugs then. I bought a book about birds expecting to read some nice things about birds. I feel that this is not unreasonable.
Chapter 2 is then literally called "The Hater's Guide to Birds", a chapter name that Anderson liked so much he reused it for two more chapters later on, out of 7 chapters total. Is he purposefully trying to piss off the audience? Is it meant to be ironic?
These chapters start off with little facts about a certain species of bird and then transition into some loose metaphor that relates this fact to some element of society. These get dumber and dumber as they go on.
The entry for the Andean Cock of the Rock (Rupicola peruvianus) starts off by talking about the noises it makes, a potentially interesting bit of information. But then it veers hard into other subjects. The last sentence on this two-page feature is "Human agency may be something else entirely - in which justice, counter to much evidence, may have a place - but what, then, to make of my squawking?" Hey man, what the fuck are you talking about?
The next chapter talks about a time when the author was out off the coast of Louisiana with some scientists looking for small mollusks in the water. The chapter talks a lot about the other scientists and their philosophies and Louisiana's loss of land to water and all about the little mollusks. Um, okay. Was this meant for the mollusk book?
The tie-in about birds in this chapter is that on the way out, the author thinks he sees a rare bird for a split second, but the others tell him he probably didn't. Then on the way back in, they see a buoy in the water and they realize he actually only saw a buoy and kinda laugh at him. And the author gets on this whole bizarre high horse about how 'maybe the so-called buoy bird is the bird we NEED to see because it's not a real bird, but it's what we want to see' or whatever... which I was thinking must be one of the dumbest things I've ever read in my life, until the author gets to the next section which is 'a year later they called me up and they found out that those types of rare birds ARE around there so I probably DID see the rare bird after all,' then goes on to lament the 'loss' of the 'fake buoy bird' he thought he saw:
"As a new and emblematic figure, I had thought the buoy bird could be playful, the kind of joke that, because it echoes through one's life, resounding through one's foibles and failures, hurts a little. But what I'm left with is more complex than the gag I'd constructed at my own expense."
Okay, now THIS is the dumbest thing I've ever read.
This whole 26-page chapter is just: "Thought I saw a bird. [Intermission: 24 pages about mollusks.] Realized I didn't see a bird. Oh wait actually it was a bird but now I'm sad about it."
The author's writing style is so pretentious and overly-embellished that I think he needs to visit a proctologist, it can't be healthy having one's head stuck so far up one's ass.
The next chapter - again named "The Hater's Guide to Birds" - starts off with an entry for the Himalayan Monal, but accidentally just has three pages of a pointless story about a guy who doesn't speak English going to a museum for free, not understanding any of it, and then crying. Hey uh - what?
This was about the halfway mark through the book, 70 pages or so, and it was at this point I decided the rest of it wasn't worth my time.
The book needed an author who could meet two criteria:
1. Likes birds
2. Good writer
Instead it got someone who didn't like birds, and who was not a good writer. So what we get is a badly-written book that's not really about birds.
In short, a pretty awful book!
March 23, 2020
This book is a gem! So much about our relationship to nature, braided elegantly with lore about birds, observations about human life. I'm glad this came into my hands just now! A bright light in a dark time! Extra points if you spot the Clash reference!
April 15, 2025
This book was made for me. So many notes, so many beautiful ideas, my favorite being birds have the largest hearts in comparison to their body size of any species (specifically the hummingbird). Sigh. Loved this so much.
April 29, 2021
I like birds and the was an interesting little book. In the end it didn’t hold my interest, but I think a true bird lover would really get into it.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews