Joy of the Birds, a novel in hardcover and paperback, by Gale Cooper, a Harvard Medical School educated M.D. forensic psychiatrist, is a star-crossed romance against a backdrop of the Old West's land-grabs, genocides, and ecological holocausts; while offering hope with a mystical map for transcendence in humanity's ongoing cosmic battle of light and darkness. It is in the tradition of Robert Pirsig's 1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.