Central Park birder Christian Cooper takes off with new memoir and Disney+ series

Good morning, and welcome to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter.

When birder Christian Cooper’s video went viral after a racially charged encounter with a white dog walker in Central Park, his first instinct told him to “crawl under a rock.”

Cooper had asked the woman to leash her dog. She responded by calling the police: “I’m going to tell them that there’s an African American man threatening my life.’’

“Fourteen words, captured on sixty-nine seconds of video, that would alter the course of two lives,” he writes. His for the better, it turned out. Hers? Not so much.

Instead of retreating, Cooper, a self-described “gay black nerd with binoculars,” decided to embrace his unexpected fame. “I realized there was an opportunity here to keep doing the things I’d always been doing, but doing them on a bigger stage, a bigger platform, and reach more people,” he tells Martin Wolk in an interview.

This summer Cooper has a new memoir and a National Geographic show he hopes will attract more people of color and diverse backgrounds to the joys of bird-watching.

On Aug. 16, he joins the L.A. Times Book Club to discuss “Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World” with Times writer Carla Hall.

Cooper’s new book tells the story of his life up to and since that fateful 2020 Central Park meeting, interspersed with travel stories and birding tips.

“Birding shifts your perceptions, adding new layers of meaning and brokering connections: between sounds and seasons, across far-flung places and between who we are as people and a wild world that both transcends and embraces us, ” he writes. “In my life it has been a window to the wondrous.”

Sign up on Eventbrite for our live streaming book club night, which starts at 6 p.m. on Aug. 16.

Cooper’s new TV series, “Extraordinary Birder With Christian Cooper,” showcases SoCal’s wild spaces. He explores the Prescott Preserve in Palm Springs, a former golf course being restored as a haven for bluebirds, flycatchers, egrets, and other species. Cooper also connects with the Audubon Society to visit the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge, where more than 400 different species have been recorded, including tens of thousands of snow geese and sandhill cranes.

The show debuted in June after a year of production in locations including Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Alabama. The six-episode season is available for streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

Book clubbers, please share your favorite places to enjoy birds in SoCal and we’ll feature your comments in an upcoming newsletter. Send an email to bookclub@latimes.com.

In the meantime, here’s a California birding story to savor, this one from Times writer Louis Sahagún. He profiles Tom and Joanne Heindel, a pair of retired teachers who started with a little bird guide, and ended with a magnum opus coming later this year. “Their book,” says Jon L. Dunn, co-author of the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, “will be a benchmark that every scientist and resource manager working in the region is going to want to keep within arm’s reach.”

July book club

Join us on Wednesday, July 19, when Luis Alberto Urrea discusses “Good Night, Irene.” His bestselling novel is a story of friendship and sacrifice inspired by his mother’s service during World War II with the American Red Cross Clubmobile corps, a group nicknamed the Donut Dollies. Sign up on Eventbrite for this 6 p.m. live streaming event.

From left: Phyllis McLaughlin de Urrea with fellow Red Cross volunteers Jill Pitts Knappenberger and Helen Anderson with WWII Clubmobile.

(Courtesy of Luis Alberto Urrea)

In advance of book club night, Urrea shares some of his favorite reads and diversions.

Last book that kept you up at night: S.A. Cosby’s “All the Sinners Bleed.”

The writers that most influenced you: My core influences are always Ursula K. LeGuin, Thomas McGuane, Annie Dilliard, Rudolfo Anaya, Leonard Cohen. But so many thousands of others. I don’t think there is a writer I have read that has not influenced me in some way.

Book you’re most proud of writing: I can only say “Good Night, Irene” for two reasons. One, I have spent my entire writing career learning how to write this book. Everything I have learned, everything I have wanted to accomplish with my work is in this book. I don’t know that I can write any better. The second reason I am so proud of this book is because it is honoring my mom and the women who served with her. It seems to be igniting a conversation around the Red Cross volunteers and the history of these women that makes me really proud that I got to be a small part of it.

(Nicole Waite / Little, Brown)

Favorite book you read as a child: “The Jungle Book.” I lived in a world I needed to escape from and that book taught me I could be Mowgli, if I wanted to be. My mother, who maybe was also living in a world that she needed to escape from, read it to me the first time. It was the first book I read to myself and I probably read it a hundred times.

What kept you motivated during years researching ‘Good Night, Irene”: My mother was a collection of contradictions and secrets I was trying to puzzle through. I knew I would have no peace until I could answer the questions for myself. I kept her journals and scrapbooks on my desk and her portrait on the stairwell. Every day she called to me.

Craziest thing you’ve done to get a story: I knew this would be a story some day, even as it was happening. I was working with a missionary group 100 miles south of the Mexican border and we went to an orphanage. For some reason, they had a spider monkey they had tied up on the roof. No one knew where it had come from or why it was there but I climbed up the rickety second-story roof with the idea of just comforting the poor thing. I brought it some water and cuddled it for a couple of hours. Eventually, it became a story I published in the San Diego Reader.

Favorite music right now: I am loving Calexico’s 20th anniversary re-release of “Feast of Wire.” The live tracks, especially, are a revelation 20 years out. (Part of this album was inspired by my first book, “Across the Wire,” so it means so much to me.)

Must-watch TV show: “The Bear.” The writing on this show is exquisite. Everything about this show is masterful.

Something that might surprise readers about you: I am serious about someday crossing paths with Sasquatch. I always have my eyes peeled.

Keep reading

Book to screen: Christopher Nolan talks about adapting Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus” for his new film. “All the films I’ve made, one way or another, are film noirs,” Nolan tells Kenneth Turan. “They’re all stories about consequences. And with ‘Oppenheimer,’ the consequences are the fastest to arrive and the most extreme.”

Freed: Former Manson disciple and homecoming queen Leslie Van Houten walked out of the California Institution for Women this week after five decades. She had been serving a life sentence for the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in Los Angeles in 1969. Here’s a Manson “family” reading list to revisit this infamous chapter of California history.

Returning to El Salvador: “Solito” author Javier Zamora writes about the mental health toll of being the lone green card holder in his family. Zamora’s essay is his first piece for De Los, the new Times initiative on everything Latinidad.

An American classic: This month marks the 40th anniversary of actor, author and recent book club guest LeVar Burton’s “Reading Rainbow,” one of the longest-running children’s shows in the history of public television.

Tale of two sisters: Clinical pharmacist Ruth Madievsky draws on her experience to paint a portrait of what it’s like to have your life go off the rails due to drug abuse in “All-Night Pharmacy,” her debut novel. “Whenever I’m asked if the drug use is fictional,” Madievsky says, “I always say, ‘It’s fictional! So fictional!’”

Lessons from the last drug epidemic: “I think that we are in a moment like the one that birthed the crack epidemic,” says Donovan X. Ramsey, a former Times reporter and author of the new book “When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era.”

Book club stories. “Jeopardy!” host and author Ken Jennings confesses he’s never lasted more than six months in a book club. Last Friday he asked contestant Raquel Austin how her own book club has lasted nearly a decade. Austin credited the longevity to a mix of complementary personalities and the group’s commitment; she said her book club even takes vacations together. “I was insufficiently committed to my book club.” Jennings replied. “I’m going to take that to heart.”

Hey, Ken! Our community book club has been thriving for four years. You’re welcome to join us anytime!

Last word

Author Isabel Allende takes over Slate’s Dear Prudence column and offers this advice to a reader: “I have been married three times, and if I live long enough, I will probably marry once more. I have ALWAYS kept my maiden name, and I have NEVER worn a ring. If this is as important to you as it is to me, don’t compromise. If he cancels the wedding, you lucked out, for marriage would have never worked out.”