Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan … and the World

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By Courtney Humphries
Kruistocht in spijkerbroek film
Smithsonian Books, 2008

Although Courtney Humphries spends a good-sized chunk of her new book Superdove taking her readers through the arcane and more than a little dotty world of professional pigeon breeding, training, and showing (it takes real effort to make dog-show people look normal, but the pigeon-folk manage it easily), she reserves her fondest focus and her best prose – not to mention her sharpest observations – for the ordinary ubiquitous city-dwelling bird all urbanites know so well. Those same urbanites often also hate those everyday pigeons, considering them filthy or destructive or even just unsightly (New Yorkers are particularly notorious in this regard), but those uncharitable souls may find their sentiments change after reading Humphries’ festive and engaging book. Donald’s Nephews download She encourages her readers to see their kinship with the avian community:

A Plumm Summer movie download Pigeons have something else in common with those people you see every day on your way to and from work. They are commuters. An albatross’s wings are so large that flapping them for very long would exhaust it. Pigeons, on the other hand, are great flappers, and they can easily power their way through a commuter flight on a windy day. It’s a lifestyle that people, once they settled into agrarian communities, no doubt related to – and took advantage of.

The book is predictably full of anecdotes and folklore, all of it good reading. Humphries is perhaps a little excitable when it comes to some of the more picturesque science of her subject (peregrine falcons don’t, for instance, dive on their prey at 200 m.p.h., though they might wish to), but this hardly detracts from a slim volume that isn’t trying to be a scientific treatise in any case. Superdove download Bath Day Inherit the Wind move is instead a book to enjoy and share, especially with city-folk of your acquaintance – and any pigeon aficionados you might be unfortunate enough to know. 

                                                                                                                               –Steve Donoghue