I've been terribly conflicted about this book. As others have written, it's mostly about the broken relationship between an obsessed "lister" (a birdwatcher that attempts to see as many species as possible), and his son. For one conflict is that, frankly, the lister seems to be a terrible person - though evaluating a book based on that would be doing it a disservice. More substantially, the book is more about the relationship between the author and his father (and here is where it shines most) than about birding. Even when the book does get more in depth about birding, big omissions are left - nowhere does the book seem to tackle tough ethical questions of listing - for example, the environmental footprint caused by listing and the ethical questions of using playback - playing recordings of birds is known to be stressful to them - merely for the sake of marking another bird down on a list.