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When Perdita, the shepherdess in "The Winter's Tale," disdains "carnations and streaked gillyvors" as "nature's bastards," the King of Bohemia counters by arguing that cross-breeding and grafting cannot be viewed as artificial or unnatural if we take a broad enough perspective: "This is an art / Which does mend nature--change it rather--but / The art itself is nature." The Oxford English Dictionary entry for "nature" rivals the entry for "real" in length and complexity. Is human activity a part of nature's process? Its product? Or its violation?
Whatever level of sophistication you favor, "Flight Maps" will provoke and excite you. In five loosely connected essays, Jennifer Price plays engagingly with definitions of the natural as Americans have revised and renewed them for more than 200 years.
To link her diverse subjects, the author keeps us constantly in pursuit of birds. "Missed Connections: The Passenger Pigeon Extinction" is followed by a wonderful account of the fledgling Audubon Society, "When Women Were Women, Men Were Men, and Birds Were Hats." Feathered friends (and foodstuffs) abdicate to plastic icons, however, in "A Brief Natural History of the Pink Flamingo," the volume's flagship essay. Light irony deepens to paradox with "Looking for Nature at the Mall: A Field Guide to the Nature Company." And by Chapter Five, the controversy between nature and artifice is moot; "Roadrunners Can't Read: The Greening of Television in the 1990s" offers cartoon birds whose habitat, once celluloid, has become limited to the TV screen.
Price's subject is ideas, and she gives us plenty to think about. But her methods are those of the ethnographer and modern historian, for whom no lode--restaurant menus, millinery inventories, bumper stickers, cartoons, television commercials, lawn ornaments and their lineage--is too humble for mining. Practicing a historiography that might be called ruminative rather than narrative, Price has a gift for animating the everyday. Her erudition and enthusiasm provide a vivid model of applied curiosity, both informing and, simultaneously, initiating the reader into habits of observation and reflection.
For example, Price reports that it took five hours for a flock of passenger pigeons--2 billion birds in a flock 240 miles long--to pass over the ornithologist Alexander Wilson, wide-eyed on the banks of the Ohio River at...