Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction: narrative themes

WHY PEACOCKS?

Sean Flynn

An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World's Most Magnificent Bird

An acclaimed journalist seeks to understand the mysterious allure of peacocks - and in the process discovers unexpected and valuable life lessons.

When Sean Flynn's neighbor in North Carolina texted "Any chance you guys want a peacock? No kidding!" he stared bewilderedly at his phone. He had never considered whether he wanted a peacock. But as an award-winning magazine writer, this kind of mystery intrigued him. So he, his wife, and their two young sons became the owners of not one but three charming yet fickle birds: Carl, Ethel, and Mr. Pickle.

In Why Peacocks?, Flynn chronicles his hilarious and heartwarming first year as a peacock owner, from struggling to build a pen to assisting the local bird doctor in surgery to triumphantly watching a peahen lay her first egg. He also examines the history of peacocks, from their appearance in the Garden of Eden to their befuddling Charles Darwin to their bewitching the likes of Flannery O'Connor and Martha Stewart. And fueled by a reporter's curiosity, he travels across the globe to learn more about the birds firsthand, with stops including a Scottish castle where peacocks have resided for centuries, a southern California community tormented by a serial killer of peacocks, and a Kansas City airport hotel hosting an annual gathering of true peafowl aficionados.

At turns comically absurd and deeply poignant, Why Peacocks? blends lively, insightful memoir and illuminating science journalism to answer the title's question. More than that, it offers surprising lessons about love, grief, fatherhood, and family.

Sean Flynn is a National Magazine Awardwinning journalist and author who's reported from six continents during the past thirty years. A long-time correspondent for GQ, his work has been widely anthologized and translated into nearly a dozen languages. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and two boys.

Available products
Book Published 2021-05-11 by Simon & Schuster
Book Published 2021-05-11 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Why Peacocks? is a wonderful book. At times moving and at times hilarious, always well written, it's a story about family life and love, pets and peacocks, that evolves into an investigation of one of evolution's biggest mysteries: Why does beauty exist?

As readers follow Flynn's journey, his clever insights and pleasing prose style will leave them alternating between moments of shock and bursts of laughter.

Sean Flynn's writing has an easy, genuine flow, like a friend telling a story over dinner, and in this charming book his story is about peacocks. He is entirely successful in answering the question in the title, but saying this is a book about peacocks seems inadequate. It ends up being about so much more.

When I started this book, I hoped Sean Flynn would take me on an amusing romp through the strange world of peacocks and their people. He certainly did that - but Why Peacocks? is so much more. It is both a warm, generous memoir about family and a master-class in science writing that shifts seamlessly between wit and wonder. It is tender. It is stylish. But, in the tradition of E.B. White and Helen Macdonald, this is not a book about the pretty surfaces of things, as pretty as those surfaces are; it is a life-affirming meditation on the nature of beauty and mortality. I can't think of any book the world needs more right now.

A truly wise and tender sparkler of a book. Weaving memoir, history, reportage, and mythology, Sean Flynn tells not just a quirky story about iridescent birds but a more profound one about family and parenthood, the innocence of childhood and our own mortality. I read it in one gulp, moved and humored and carried away by Flynn's heart and artistry as a master storyteller.

Ostensibly about peacocks, Flynn's book is much more than that: it is a story woven with beauty and obsession and loss. Funny, poignant, very well written and a pleasure to read.

Wry and moving.