Two of the possible definitions for the word “pathological” offered by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary are “altered or caused by a disease” and “being such to a degree that is extreme, excessive, or markedly abnormal.” While allowing for vast differences in the perspectives of those contemplating it, and certainly not to levy any moral judgment upon it, it is difficult not to conclude that Phoebe Snetsinger’s dedication to birding was indeed pathological. However once this definition is applied, the deeper and more difficult questions emerge. Was the disease cancer, depression, or the misogyny of mid-twentieth century America? Where is the line rightly drawn between hobby and obsession? In Life List: A Woman’s Quest for the World’s Most Amazing Birds
Most avid birders well know the story of Phoebe Snetsinger. Despite a mid-life diagnosis of metastatic melanoma and repeated relapses of the disease, she went on to spend decades travelling the world in an ultimately successful quest to be the first person to see 8,000 species of birds. Along the way, she experienced robbery, assault, disease, injury, and even rape, yet none of these stopped her from completing her quest. So long as this was all there was to the story, her life could not have been of great interest to many beyond the birding community. To the average person, such a life would have and likely did seem strange. What would motivate anyone to spend such sums, and endure such risks and hardships, simply to see birds and add them to a list – birds, it must be remembered, of which most of the people in the world had never even heard the names?
Yet there was much more to Phoebe’s story than most people knew, experiences and struggles that make her simultaneously more intelligible as well as more enigmatic to a far larger group of people than birders alone. Had the biographer laid bare in Life List some of the personal triumphs and heartbreaks that made Phoebe who she was without the participation of the Snetsinger family, friends, and access to Phoebe’s own journals and poetry, it would be easy to dismiss the work as “overly creative.” However while the work does rely heavily on the reflections of her immediate family and some of the guides with whom she spent much of her later life to the possible exclusion of others who also knew her (although it might be asked how many more truly knew her well), it is entirely believable and, more important from the standpoint of the reader, highly readable.
As a casual bird watcher herself, Ms. Gentile made great efforts to gain an understanding of what avid birders do and how they do it, even going so far as to participate on two international birding trips. To ensure that Life List is intelligible to non-birders, she clearly defines and describes aspects of the activity so that readers unfamiliar with it are not dissuaded from continuing to read. Indeed, while Life List well deserves its place in the ever-expanding canon of birding literature, it is one of those rare works which so well speaks about an often obscure topic to a general audience that it also deserves an equal place in the canon of American biography as well.
Author(s): Olivia Gentile
Hardcover; 345 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Publication Date: March 31, 2009
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1596911697
In accordance with Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255, it is disclosed that the copy of the book read in order to produce this review was provided gratis to the reviewer by the publisher.
