“Vesper Flights” asks us to celebrate what companionship we can get from them even as we also learn to leave them alone. Appropriately, Ms. Macdonald’s book is full of birds taking flight, out of sight if not out of mind. In “Vesper Flights,” the essay that supplies the book’s excellent title, Ms. Macdonald singles out the spectacular twilight ascents of European swifts. Embarking on her own vesper flights but with her eyes trained on animals, Ms. Macdonald reminds us how marvelously unfamiliar much of the nonhuman world remains to us, even as we continue to diminish it. Ms. Macdonald sometimes engages in analogy too, but she inverts the terms, turning humans into a cruder, less-agreeable version of animals.

Source: Wall Street Journal August 14, 2020 15:10 UTC