Connections to new friends, hot spots, current events, trends, musicians and authors often come through social networking sites. Friends of friends are worthy of a click or two, particularly if there are similar interests. The term “friend” is used here loosely as social networkers tend to acquire hundreds if not thousands of acquaintances as a status symbol. Others are picky in their selections and many hide information from the uninvited.
Author Connection Through Facebook
In the days before social networking, one followed journalist/author Amanda Hesser through her enviable position as Food Editor for the New York Times Magazine. Email correspondence initiated in response to her articles was the next evolution and now she’s on Facebook and that’s the link to author Olivia Gentile, who recently published a biography of Phoebe Snetsinger, entitled Life List.
Hesser has, and continues to, write about everything on the table from Apple Pie to Zucchini, peppering her prose with autobiographical snippets, particularly about her husband Tad. The articles she wrote during her courtship with “Mr. Latte,” her husband since 2002, are indelibly memorable and in this reviewer’s opinion at least one of her essays should have been included in book she edited, Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table. But that is for a future review.
Just as surprising as the unmasking of Mr. Latte and finding out that Mr. Big’s first name is John, Gentile’s exploration of Birding resonates with bigger themes such as women’s traditional roles. Life List reads as a metaphor for the goals set for different decades of one’s existence.
Phoebe Snetsinger Birdwatcher
Ms. Gentile tackles bird watching in a way that draws in fervent birders as well as those who find tromping through the bushes searching for birds, a curiosity not worth exploring. It’s Phoebe Snetsinger’s back-story that tweets and hums along expanded from a bird’s eye view under Gentile’s careful hand.
Snetsinger did as all young women did at the time and married right after college, forfeiting her potential career in science. She took up birding as a way to get out of the house and have an interest to call her own. After moving to St. Louis due to her husband’s job, Snetsinger’s hobby provided her with a ready-made community and gave her a life beyond mothering and housework. After being diagnosed with cancer in 1981, she was given less than a year to live. This provided Snetsinger with the impetus to take this to the next level, to travel the world in search of birds to add to her list.
The biography brings to life Leo Burnett, Snetsinger’s father, who was responsible for advertising icons such as the Marlboro Man, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, Tony the Tiger, Toucan Sam and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Anthropomorphizing animals in the name of selling products was Burnett’s specialty. If bird watching isn’t your thing, the parts about Burnett and Snetsinger’s revelations about life are worth the price of the book.
Life list as metaphor for life goals
Gentile expertly guides the reader through the terminology of bird watching, allowing the reader space between the words to apply and appreciate birding as a microcosm of life in general. In the introduction Gentile tells of her initiation to the world of birding and what led her to write the essay that was a catalyst for Life List. “I’d never given birds a moment of my attention. But when I looked through Tait’s binoculars, I saw their subtle loveliness: the lemon yellow of the warbler’s breast; the slow wing-beat of a hawk in flight; the curl of a heron’s long, slender neck.”
In the final passage of Gentile’s introduction, the raison d’etre for this book is clearly stated and urges the reader on to the story, searching if not for birds but for life’s clues. “This books is about Phoebe, and about birding, a way of life I wanted to better understand. But it’s also about the larger questions Phoebe’s life raises. What happens when society pushes you into a role that you aren’t meant to play? If you’re told that you only have a short time to live, how should you spend it? Where is the line between dedication and obsession, and when does obsession cross the line into pathology? What does it mean, ultimately, to live, and die, well?”
Gentile interviewed Snetsinger’s family and friends for Life List and much of the memories and conversations cited sum up a life well lived. She recounts the words of daughter, Sue, at the memorial service in 1999 following a fatal car accident. “The most important bits she passed on to me were through examples in the way she lived her life. Don’t be scared, explore & adventure, life a full life, and enjoy special moments to the fullest – they only come once.”
The epitaph by a daughter and siblings who at times wished for a “normal mother,” is a fitting tribute to Phoebe Snetsinger whose story transcends her time. As an inspiration to take stock of the way one lives, Life List is first rate and the book’s success a harbinger of more to come from Olivia Gentile.
About the author
Olivia Gentile graduated from Harvard University and earned her M.F.A. at Columbia University in New York City where she now resides. In 2006 she was a fellow at the prestigious MacDowell Colony and has won numerous awards as a newspaper reporter in Vermont and Connecticut.
Life List
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (March 31, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1596911697
ISBN-13: 978-1596911697
Eat, Memory
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. (November 17, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393067637
ISBN-13: 978-0393067637
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