This book tackles two completely different topics: birds and Classical music. Haupt learned that Mozart owned a starling, so she decided to raise a starling of her own so that she could make some educated guesses about Mozart's experience. The book is partly a memoir of raising her starling and how she totally fell in love with the bird, and partly a biographical sketch of Mozart, focusing on the years he spent in Vienna when he owned his starling. It's a charming book. It's an interesting way of doing history: Haupt by necessity speculates a lot about the role the starling must have had in Mozart's daily life, and living with her own starling is kind of an experimental archaeology approach. Haupt does a good job of making it clear when she is speculating and when she is relying on primary sources. ( )

I really enjoyed this book. The author raised a starling to enable her experience of that part of Mozart's life, and equated that experience to some of what she was able to glean from her research in sources and in experience when analyzing his music. I learned much about Mozart's life and about starlings. She gave me a desire if I were younger to raise a starling, and to listen to Mozart's music once again, the former too late, and the latter quite possible and I am following through with that. What an interesting and enjoyable book! ( )

Charming, imaginative, and idealistic reflection on the unity of being and the possibility of sympathetic immersion in other times and other lives. (NB. Often these days, idealism is used as a term of dismissal and contempt for the soft-headed. I do not use it that way. God knows one of the things missing in our current time and most needed is idealism. In fact, it strikes me as rather brave and radical to express an idealistic conviction.)
The author writes well and wittily about life with a starling. I loved her attempt to flesh out the story of Mozart and his starling.
Now I want a starling of my own. ( )

If you love birds and/or music (especially Mozart), this will likely charm you. If you don't particularly care about either, it may not. As an enthusiastic birdwatcher and bird feeder, I did enjoy Haupt's tale of her hand-caught and raised starling, Carmen. Starlings are smart, personable, funny, vocal and quite delightful one-on-one, rather like the author, I think - Haupt and Carmen are both good company. Haupt is very good at covering acres of biological and ornithological research in a bright, accessible way. She explains vividly the history of the starling's misguided introduction into North America and the ensuing ecological disaster they have become, and while she loves HER starling, she very much wishes there were no others around. Oddly, she does not touch on the fact that the starling population in Europe has crashed to the extent that they are now listed as endangered there, and that they are actually starting to decline here as well (I haven't had a starling at my backyard feeders in several years; I used to host flocks of dozens at a time).

The weakness of the book is that while she starts from the sweet story of Mozart's pet starling (purchased because it allegedly could sing phrases from one of his concerti...which had not been published yet), her attempts to carpenter Mozart and his music together with starlings and their biology and behaviors is a bit rickety. The book meanders, changes focus, skips ahead and back... it might have worked better as two separate long magazine articles: one on starlings, and one focused exclusively on the man-and-his-bird story. Each story is fun and enjoyable; trying to thread them into a coherent whole, less so. ( )

Oh, this book has just been delightful to read and more. In this busy and fretful time, I’ve retreated every evening just to enjoy the story. I’ve also been listening to starling YouTubes and turned my ear to birds in general.
But hidden by this author who feels like an engaging dinner guest are some serious challenges. “We are at the edge of a new paradigm shift in the nature of scientific discourse, and we are being led by one of the worlds most common, most reviled birds.” As she says, “smiling like a jackass eating thistles.” Here’s a link to the part that the starling memorized. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart's_starling
P.s. I’m thinking about the last pages - and the notes on how murmurations, those astonishing flights of hundreds of starlings together and how each starling affects 7 others, if only with the tip of a feather.
( )