Product Description

Storm petrels fly from a midnight sea in June to their nesting holes in a two-thousand-year-old stone tower; a million starlings gather to roost from all points across a freezing winter sky; migrant redstarts, only weeks out of their nest, set off over alien seas on their way to Africa; a pair of airborne swifts lie together for an instant as they mate hundreds of feet up in the sky. "The Running Sky" records a lifetime of looking at birds. There have been many books on the birdwatcher's awkward obsession, but there has been nothing until this that so brilliantly restores us to the primacy of looking, the thrill of watching and thinking about the flying wild creatures that share our planet. Tim Dee writes about what he has seen in a language we have never read before but will recognise as accurate and familiar, with insights new-minted yet immediately understood, in prose that is at once precise and poetic. "The Running Sky" follows the birds' year from one summer to the next. Tim Dee maps his own observations and encounters over four decades, tracking birds - well-known and bizarre, flying free, in the nest, in his hand as he rings them, or dead and stuffed on his mantelpiece - from northern Shetland to south-west England via downtown Los Angeles and a tobacco farm in southern Zambia. He writes about near-global birds like sparrows, starlings and ravens, and exotic species, like electrically coloured hummingbirds in California and bee-eaters and broadbills in Africa. The book begins in the summer with clouds of breeding seabirds in Shetland and ends with crepuscular nightjars like giant moths in the heart of England, and takes us outside, again and again, to stand - with or without binoculars - under the storm of life over our heads, and to marvel once more, as all humankind has, at what is flying about us. In the current resurgence of British nature writing, "The Running Sky" will take its place in the very first rank.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #853 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Review
`Lyrical...he possesses an awareness which makes this a touchingly human document.'
--Daily Express

"What makes his book wonderful - is his passion... He captures the thrill and puzzlement of watching birds" --The Sunday Herald

'"Serious and playful"... a powerful and intensely poetic paean to what others have called "the wonder of birds".'
--The Saturday Guardian

About the Author
Tim Dee was born in Liverpool in 1961. He has worked as a BBC radio producer for twenty years and divides his life between Bristol and Cambridge. This is his first book.

Customer Reviews

Jealousy!
It's not fair. Over the past few years a rare selection of "country" books have come out, and it seems that each one builds on the last. Was Roger Deakin's "Waterlog" the first? In my mind it was, and still remains the best report of man's relationship with the country. Having said that, there have recently been a number of volumes challenging that masterpiece of which this is the latest I have read. The previous reviewer makes the case for reading this much more eloquently than I can, but if ever a book was more suited to being read next to the statutory roaring log fire, then this is it. (That's quite a pile of books by said fire now, so lets hope for a cold spell eh?)

And jealousy? Well I really envy those authors who have the time, money(!), and opportunity to undertake these projects and then have the gall to write so brilliantly about them. The ability to bring out what should be so blooming obvious as we wander around is a rare gift and Mr Dee accomplishes this so well. As I say, it's not fair!

Magnificent
This is a book that is lived in every word. It is as if, when reading it, you are borrowing another man's life. That is its governing quality: a quivering exposure of things, a depth of knowledge, an overwhelming affection for the phenomena of life, a precision and a melancholy and the authority which an unbroken tenderness gives it. There are all sorts of visionary moments: the feathers of a woodcock considered as 'a book of browns', the distant impenetrability of a bird's eye seen 'as if realness was reserved for them alone', the endless rippling intersections of human and avian, as if each were the other translated into other bodies and minds.

This is, in the end, a magnificent, multi-dimensional reporting of a life always alert to the presence of the wild around us, an entire sensibility transcribed on to the page. Anyone who wants to know what it means to be fully alive should read it.

a life worth sharing
I was attracted by the cover as i waited for my wife in the shop at martin mere. i started to read it as she took her time choosing packs of cards. by the time i got to his amazing descriptions of gannets diving i knew i had to buy this book. Reading it has been an immense pleasure. The prose is fabulous - this is some of the best writing i have read in a long time - and the sense of the world he conveys is miraculous. The book drove me out. each time i finished a chapter i was gripped by a desire to get out into the countryside and watch the skies. but even more than that the book touched on what it means to be human and those insights into his own life added to the whole. I cannot recommend this book enough - it would be a great present to anyone who liked good writing. it certainly is a life worth sharing