Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds

#500
Title: Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds
Author: Olivia Gentile
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Year: 2009
345 pages

This biography of Phoebe Snetsinger, the woman who held (and appears still to hold) the world record for most bird species seen, answers many of the questions implicit, but not answered, in her autobiography, Birding on Borrowed Time. These include such nagging concerns as how she paid for her frequent birding expeditions and what her family thought of this pursuit over time. (Answers: Inheritance, more explicitly documented here, and With increasing annoyance.) Gentile is reasonably evenhanded and fills in Snetsinger's own account nicely. For example, to the best of my recollection, Snetsinger does not mention having a daughter who is lesbian and who officially changed her name to Marmot in adulthood.

My one complaint is that Gentile seems unable to grasp as a possibility that Snetsinger's rape, while clearly upsetting to her, may not have been as significant for Snetsinger as Gentile wants it to be. I use this language deliberately because much of Gentile's narrative is focused on the rape as an emotional impetus for Snetsinger's subsequent accelerated birding. This could be true, but as a psychologist, I think Gentile's horror may drive her interpretation as much as the rape (or, for that matter, recurrent malignant melanomas) may have motivated Snetsinger. This ultimqately doesn't detract a great deal, but it is intrusive.