Reviews for Snoring Bird My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology

The average rating for Snoring Bird My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-18 00:00:00 Daniel Nowlan Memoirs don’t usually strike me as fast paced and action packed, but this one was. From stories of specimen collecting in Africa to the account of two women’s flight from the Red Army after WWII with two toddlers in tow, this story is breathtaking. I found it difficult to put down. I initially picked up this book after reading The Mind of the Raven by the same author. It left me intrigued about Bernd Heinrich’s story — what sort of person spends his life studying wildlife with such intensity — even to the point of physical hardship? As I made my way through the pages of this narrative, I found that Bernd’s story couldn’t be fully understood without the history of his family as well. The memoir is equally about the author’s father — an avid taxonomist who lived in Germany during both world wars and eventually immigrated to America. I found it to be riveting on many levels: as a glimpse into the life of a German family during the first half of the twentieth century, as an account of two men whose lives were committed to the natural world around them despite the changing trends and practices of the scientific world, and most of all as a vivid portrait of remarkable people living out lives that would seem utterly implausible in the pages of a novel.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-11 00:00:00 Randy Smith When reading "Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death", one of Heinrich's earlier books, he mentions in passing things he saw or did in the forest shortly after World War 2, when his family was living there and had to scavenge food. He does not elaborate, as his topic then was more nature and less humanity. But, it did pique one's interest. Here he gives us the rest of the story, and it is a whopper. Heinrich begins near the end, with a visit to his mother ("mamushka"), living alone as an old lady (well, she has cats and other animals). In the barn, he comes across possessions of his now-deceased father, and it inspires him to write his father's life story. Heinrich the Elder was, among other things: 1) one of the world's experts on ichneumon wasps 2) a WW1 fighter pilot 3) a WW2 veteran 4) an immigrant who had to sneak out of Poland and back into Germany, with his family, evading both the retreating Nazis, the very-angry-at-Germans Poles, the also-angry-at-Germans Soviets, and find a way to get himself and his family to America 5) a grumpy old man who did not entirely approve of the turn of late 20th century biology from field research into mathematically-oriented lab work But this, of course, leaves out a great deal, and it takes over 400 well-written pages for Heinrich the Younger to do it so I won't try to summarize more here. It is, of course, also the tale of the author's life, and in particular the ways in which it paralleled and diverged from his father's. There is a point, often around middle-age, when a man often starts to think differently about his parents. Instead of being an authoritative and often unreasonable source of frustration, you are more able to see them as people who are often just making it up as they go along, just like you. Heinrich the Elder managed to survive a very turbulent part of the 20th century, in the part of Europe where it was at its most turbulent, and brought his wife (or more than one, it's kind of complicated) and several children alive with him. Some of this was good luck. Some of this was good planning. Some of it was things like using his position to rescue a Polish welder from a concentration camp, and discovering later that people can be very grateful for that kind of thing, and you may find their help immensely useful when the tables are turned. The story, or several parallel ones, are told skillfully and with a great combination of humor and empathy, both honest and forgiving about flaws (his father's or his own or anyone else's). Equally interesting is the enormous contrast between the pre-war Poland and Germany which the story begins in, and the post-WW2 America (especially Maine) which it ends up in. The contrast between the two worlds is enormous, and the ability of anyone who manages to live life in both of them is to be admired. There is also a similar distance between the earlier world of biology in which hunting (literally) for new species in the remotest wildernesses of the world, was what was called for (and paid for), and the later portion in which lab analysis was instead. Here, the author made the leap better than his father, and it adds a very human touch to the scientific part of the tale. It is said sometimes that science advances one tombstone at a time, as the opponents of new ideas are not so much convinced as outlasted. There is some truth to it, but it adds a new dimension to the saying, to read the story of one scientist, never at home in the new world, who was nevertheless (like all the scientists of his generation) a necessary precondition for it.