Koeppel, Dan 1962(?)–

PERSONAL: Born c. 1962; son of Richard (a physician) Koeppel.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Penguin Group, c/o Hudson Street Press Publicity, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014. E-mail—soulbarn@gmail.com.

CAREER: Writer, journalist, and outdoorsman.

WRITINGS:

Extreme Sports Almanac, Roxbury Park/Lowell House Juvenile (Los Angeles, CA), 1998, published as Updated Extreme Sports Almanac, Roxbury Park/Lowell House Juvenile (Lincolnwood, IL), 2000.

(With Bob Roll) The Tour de France Companion, Workman Publishing (New York, NY), 2005.

To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, a Son, and a Lifelong Obsession, Hudson Street Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals such as National Geographic Adventure, Audubon, and Outside. Author of episode for television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1995.

SIDELIGHTS: Author and sports journalist Dan Koeppel is an extreme sports expert and a cycling enthusiast. In Extreme Sports Almanac, he explores the explosion of adrenaline-charged competitive and recreational sports such as mountain biking, snowboarding, big-wave surfing, and other sports that require as much nerve as they do athletic ability. In The Tour de France Companion, which was fueled by intense American spectator interest when cycling phenomenon Lance Armstrong bested cancer to become a record-holding seven-time winner of the grueling international bicycle race, Koeppel and coauthor Bob Roll provide detailed information on the race for seasoned fans and newcomers alike. Roll and Koeppel explain the sport's famous colored jerseys, the technical aspects of the race, how teams work and win together, and how even last-place finishers are honored. The illustrated guide includes rules, history, personality profiles, strategies for winning, and techniques of the most successful riders, including Armstrong.

Koeppel turns to a more sedate and personal sport with To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, a Son, and a Lifelong Obsession. The book is his "homage to this father-son relationship, told through his father's competitive birding and the effects that obsession has had on his life," noted Cathie Beck in the Rocky Mountain News. When he was eleven years old in the 1940s, Dan's father, Richard Koeppel, first saw a brown thrasher. This bird sighting, in Queens, New York, ignited a lifelong passion for bird spotting that morphed, eventually, into an unhealthy obsession. Extreme birders seek to add as many confirmed sightings of as many species as possible out of the approximately 10,000 known bird species. Only a handful of people have reached the top levels of birding with more than 7,000 species sightings to their credit. Richard Koeppel reached this level, but at great expense to his personal and professional life.

Koeppel portrays his father as a "tragic figure who passionately wanted to become an ornithologist but became the doctor his parents wanted him to be instead," noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. His medical career did not fulfill him; neither did his role as husband and father. Birding took precedence, and as a result his marriage withered and died. Growing up, Dan Koeppel sensed his father's birding "was such a present force that I didn't feel I had a family," he commented in a review by Anita Manning in USA Today. "I felt I had a dad who had this amazing talent/curse/obsession." Noted Manning, the author "admires the dedication and tenacity it took to achieve the top levels of birding, but as a son, he resents the emotional wall that was created." Health problems forced Richard to cut back on his birding expeditions, and finally to stop altogether after logging more than 7,200 species.

Koeppel describes how, as an adult, he worked to understand his father's obsession with birds. As Richard battled health problems and cut back on his birding, father and son became closer, remaking a relationship that had suffered for more than forty years. A Kirkus Reviews critic observed that "readers will admire his courage in keeping after his father and take pleasure in the heart-gladdening connection they have made over the past few years." "Artfully weaving biography, autobiography, and the history of birding in America in To See Every Bird on Earth, Koeppel tells a story that will fascinate anyone who birds, lives with a birder, or, for that matter, anyone who is obsessed with an arcane pursuit or living with such a person," commented Susan Lumpkin in Zoogoer. The book "never loses sight of its ultimate goal: to show the emotional core of a man whose experiences have left him unwilling to show his emotions, save perhaps in the obsessive pursuit of the next item on his list," observed Peter Cashwell in Chicago Tribune.

Koeppel told CA: "I've been writing since I was five or six years old—I started by doing my own comic books. For me, the appeal has always been to explore the world—not just physically, as my work now allows me, but to use the process as a way of understanding and embracing things that are fun or interesting or important. I think that even nonfiction, which is what I do pretty exclusively these days, is an attempt if not to create then certainly to define the world a writer lives in, and through that process somehow make peace with it.

"The most surprising thing I've learned is how simple the process actually is—if you're willing to do the legwork. For me, point-of-view is a byproduct of reporting.

"None of my books are my favorite, I can't even stand to look at them because they seem so imperfect. Maybe my next one. I really just hope people will read them and enjoy them. For me, the effect I most hope for is that they allow me to never work under florescent lights again."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Audubon, May-June, 2005, Jesse Greenspan, review of To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, a Son, and a Lifelong Obsession, p. 76.

Chicago Tribune, July 3, 2005, Peter Cashwell, "Books of a Feather: Looking at Birds and Those Who Look at—and Listen to—Them," review of To See Every Bird on Earth.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2005, review of To See Every Bird on Earth, p. 336.

Library Journal, May 1, 2005, Henry T. Armistead, review of To See Every Bird on Earth, p. 112.

Newsday, July 17, 2005, Kerry Fried, "For the Birds," review of To See Every Bird on Earth.

Publishers Weekly, March 14, 2005, review of To See Every Bird on Earth, p. 53.

Rocky Mountain News, June 9, 2005, Cathie Beck, "Birdwatching Memoir Ode to Father-Son Relationship," review of To See Every Bird on Earth.

Star-Telegram (Dallas/Fort Worth, TX), May 24, 2005, David Martindale, "Chat Room: Bob Roll and Dan Koeppel, the Tour de France Companion Authors," interview with Dan Koeppel.

USA Today, June 16, 2005, Anita Manning, "How Bird-Watching Went from Man's Hobby to Obsession," review of To See Every Bird on Earth.

Zoogoer (Washington, DC), May-June, 2005, "Books, Naturally," review of To See Every Bird on Earth.

ONLINE

Every Bird Web Log, http://www.everybird.com/ (August 19, 2005).