Sometimes a small story can help to paint a much bigger picture. That’s the case with The Feather Wars by James H. McCommons. Actually, his is not a small story at all, it’s a remarkable accounting of America’s assault on birds around the Gilded Age. McCommons writes about flocks of birds more than a hundred miles long: birds, the passenger pigeon in this case, that were hunted into extinction. Through McCommon’s stories, we learn more about the Gilded Age overall…and that, you might say, is a feather in his cap, though, in this case, that is not a good thing.