Republic of Feathers

I’m writing a book!

If you talked to me for more than five minutes at any point between 2020 and 2024, I probably rambled your ear off about The Power Broker. In case you haven’t read it (or haven’t patiently listened to me trying to convince you to read it), it’s a biography written by Robert Caro about Robert Moses, New York City’s Parks and Recreation Commissioner from 1934 to 1960, who was improbably the most powerful and consequential New Yorker of the 20th century. The book was written in 1974, is 1,336 pages long, weighs nearly four pounds, and is the best thing I’ve ever read.

On its face, this doesn’t sound like a winning recipe for The Best Book of All Time. Even after dozens of attempts, I have a hard time articulating why it deserves the title. I could say something about Caro’s prose, the extent of his research, his compassion for little people as he writes about big men. The best I can offer is that the literary world he creates inspires a sort of nostalgia in me that I haven’t felt since I read Harry Potter as a child.

This picture is a little misleading; I listened to the audiobook.

I’d never heard of The Power Broker until a grad school classmate invited me to read it in a book club purpose-built to tackle the volume over the course of a year. After I finished the book (as I continue to remind the other book club members, I was the only one who actually did), I went on to read everything else Caro has written.

Robert Caro spent a decade writing The Power Broker, and for his efforts won a Pulitzer Prize. Since then, his only project has been chronicling the life of Lyndon B. Johnson. Fifty years, four volumes, and 3,522 pages later, Caro has only covered LBJ’s life up to the first few months of his presidency. Caro, at ninety years old, is only now writing the book covering Johnson’s time in the Oval Office. I hope he finishes soon.

Three years ago, I was talking with my good friend and fellow book club member Molly about the idea of a singular talent dedicating their sixty-year career to writing about just two people. We arrived at a question: If you were in his position, what would you spend your life writing about? I said, “I don’t know, probably something about birds and American history.”

Molly said, “you should write that book.”

I had never written before, aside from term papers and government reports. I went to school for public policy. Aside from the forty or so books on American history I read each year, I’d never formally studied the subject. But for some reason, this conversation put a worm in my brain.

I started reading, just to see what was out there, and to see what wasn’t. I already knew a bit about some pioneering ornithologists, but I wanted to know about everyone else. For the vast majority of Americans over the last four hundred years—people who professed no engrossing interest in birds—how did birds show up in their lives? This is the book I wanted to read, but no one had written it yet.

So I read some more, and then I started to write. I learned about how John James Audubon ate every bird that he painted. I learned that nearly everyone used to sleep on a featherbed, and that packing one took the feathers from 1,700 passenger pigeons. I learned that if you were rich, you ate canvasback duck, and if you weren’t, you ate robin pie. I learned that the battle to keep cats from killing birds goes back more than a century, that millions of kids used to celebrate Bird Day, that house sparrows were attacked in nativist terms, and that Italian immigrants were attacked for hunting songbirds. Learning and sharing these stories has been one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done.

When I moved to New York City earlier this year, I decided to take a few months to focus on writing full-time and see where things might go. Thanks to my incredibly supportive wife, I had the time and space to try to bring this book into the world. This summer, I wrote a book proposal. In the fall, I found terrific literary agents that immediately understood the book’s vision. Three weeks ago, we submitted the proposal to publishers.

And last Monday, I got a book deal.

I’m grateful that my book has found a home at Holt, and that they’ve given me the freedom to spend the next year or two working on it full-time. Sharing stories about our evolving relationship with birds in this newsletter has been a wonderful experience—it’s turned me into a writer!—and I’m excited to unite those stories into a single narrative that follows our relationship with birds from before colonization to today.

Republic of Feathers will tell the story of how Americans went from viewing birds as a resource that only existed to be exploited, through their transformation into beings worth protecting in their own right. This was a cultural, moral, economic, and legal revolution that turned birds from commodities into wards of the state, recognizing them as a priceless part of our national heritage. Birds have always been central to America’s economy, values, laws, divisions, and identity. The way we’ve treated them reflects tensions between freedom and control, belonging and exclusion, abundance and restraint—the most enduring contradictions in American life.

America is the market hunters that drove passenger pigeons extinct, and the children who mourned their passing. America is the wealthy White northerners who fought to protect birds, and the southern Blacks who they persecuted for using birds for subsistence. America is the land and all the beings who live on it. It’s the geese and crows and robins, and it’s the gaping void where the ivory-billed woodpecker once lived. It’s the foreign starlings and sparrows who made America their own, who have been reviled and slaughtered ever since. America is the migrating warblers that make a mockery of national boundaries. It’s the wetlands that ducks call home, and the wetlands dredged to make room for suburbs and soybeans. These are many histories—billions of histories—but they’re also one history. And that’s the one I’m going to tell.

American colonizers and their descendants have had many relationships with the country’s birds over the last four hundred years, and Indigenous Americans have had their own relationships with birds for thousands of years longer. Right now we’re tasked with imagining models of coexistence that allow bird populations to thrive alongside prosperous, just, and healthy human populations. Fortunately, we don’t have to pull these models from the ether. Many of them have been explored before, and battles to make them reality have been fought and won. Over the centuries there’s so much we have learned, and so much we’ve forgotten. I hope that this book will not just uncover past worlds, but reveal worlds that could exist again.

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And now—I need to write the book! I don’t have a release date yet, but it will be a few years before the book comes out. I’ll share big updates as they come in this newsletter. For the next year or two, I’m going to focus on grinding out this book. This might mean that my posts become a little shorter or less frequent. But! They will keep coming—I have a spreadsheet of around 150 topics I haven’t been able to share yet, and they’re burning a hole in my pocket.

Finally, THANK YOU! You’ve shown me—and shown my publisher—that there’s an interest in this kind of story, that it’s worth understanding where our relationship with nature comes from, and that these stories matter.