Douglas Carlson
How would you live your life if at the age of 26, going against your father’s will, you produced a life changing book? Find out how Roger Tory Peterson lived his life after publishing his Field Guide to the Birds in 1934. See what it was like for him to go from someone folks thought was too dreamy to amount to anything, to being able to turn his passion for observing nature into a profession. This account of his life is written in a very straight forward manner, so you feel like you are getting the facts of his life, rather than commentary, embellishment, or even reading something done by a fan.
From the publisher: Beginning with his 1934 Field Guide to the Birds, Roger Tory Peterson introduced literally millions of people to the pleasures of observing birds in the wild. His field guide, which has gone through five editions and sold more than four million copies, fostered an appreciation for the natural world that set the stage for the contemporary environmental movement. When Rachel Carson's Silent Spring sounded a warning about the threat to birds and their habitats in the 1960s, the Peterson field guides had already prepared the public and the scientific community to heed the warning and fight to save habitat and protect endangered species—a result that Peterson wholeheartedly approved.
In this authoritative, highly readable biography of Roger Tory Peterson (1908-1996), Douglas Carlson creates a fascinating portrait of the complex, often conflicted man behind the brand name. He describes how Peterson's obsession with birds began in boyhood and continued throughout a multifaceted career as a painter, writer, educator, environmentalist, and photographer. Carlson traces Peterson's long struggle to become both an accomplished bird artist and a scientific naturalist—competing goals that drove Peterson to work to the point of exhaustion and that also deprived him of many aspects of a normal personal life. Carlson also records Peterson's many lasting achievements, from the phenomenal success of the field guides, to the bird paintings that brought him renown as "the twentieth century's Audubon," to the establishment of the Roger Tory Peterson Institute to carry on his work in conservation and education.
Douglas Carlson is a retired professor of English who has written extensively about the natural world. A longtime resident of the Jamestown, New York, area where Roger Tory Peterson grew up, Carlson also lived and taught in Minnesota before moving to Athens, Georgia, to work on the Georgia Review
Hardcover with dust jacket, 308 pp., 6 x 9 in., 15 b&w illus., October 2007, printed in the U.S.A..
Want to see the video commemorating his life and accomplishments mentioned in the book? See “A Celebration of Birds with Roger Tory Peterson.” The film omits their adventure returning from filming an island off the coast of Maine that nearly cost Peterson his life, put lets you hear some of the stories covered in this book described by Peterson himself., including the time he sat down to dinner in Cape May, NJ….20 sharp-shinned hawks ‘boiled up like squab.'
