Visitors to Victoria, British Columbia’s inner harbor cannot fail to notice the bronze statue situated at the corner of Government and Belleville Streets, catty-corner to the British Columbia Parliament Buildings. It is of an older woman, surrounded by animals, the most prominent of which is a small monkey perched upon her right shoulder. The woman, of course, if the famous Canadian author and artist Emily Carr; the monkey is the nearly-as-famous Woo.
If only the eleventh chapter of Elizabeth J. Rosenthal’s Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson was the entirety of the book, it would still be well worth the cover price…
Douglas Carlson’s biography is sufficiently expansive in scope to encompass the many facets of Peterson without being unwieldy in length or needlessly excessive in detail.