Dreambirds: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune [Paperback]

Rob Nixon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2001

The ostrich is one of natures misfits: a gigantic bird that can neither fly nor sing. But the fin-de-sicle fetish for feathers made ostrich plumes more precious than gold. Rob Nixon grew up near the South African desert where ostriches first boomed, and had an early passion for the outsize bird. Later, his rejection of apartheid led him to immigrate to the United States, where he encountered a new wave of ostrich mania: American ranchers were trying to convert the gawky bird into a low-cal cuisine. Part memoir, part travelogue, Dreambirds is a natural history of a fantasy and a beautifully crafted, candid revelation of a man's soul.AUTHORBIO: Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice, and Outside magazine. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, as well as a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Originally from South Africa, he now lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ostriches are curious birds, comfortably fitting into no single biological category--for which reason Carl von Linné, the taxonomist, called it Struthio camelus, the "sparrow-camel." An Arab folktale confirms Linné's choice, relating that when it was asked to choose just which camp it belonged to, the ostrich could not decide whether to be a bird or a mammal, for which God condemned it to live alone in one of the harshest deserts on earth, the Karoo of South Africa.

The Karoo, it happens, is Rob Nixon's native ground, and although he has spent much of his adult life in the United States teaching literature, the desert landscape haunts his dreams. (So, too, do ostriches, about which Nixon commands a phenomenal amount of information.) The fantasy of Nixon's subtitle speaks not only to some of his late-night thoughts about the land of his birth, but also to the would-be empires of the Karoo's early European settlers, who sought their fortunes in gold and diamonds--and then, when that did not work, in ostrich feathers, a highly sought fashion commodity as subject to cycles of boom and bust as any other trade good. Nixon charts the fortunes of the Karoo's 19th-century "ostrich elite," updating their story with an appropriately curious recent development: the introduction of industrial ostrich ranching to the American Southwest, where a new generation of dreamers is hoping to make their fortunes in eggs, leather, meat, and other products.

Literate, learned, and endlessly entertaining, Dreambirds is mandatory reading for ostrich fanciers everywhere. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Once in a while a book comes along that makes magical a seemingly odd subject. Part memoir of his youth in South Africa's Karoo desert, part social history of the men and women who have chased ostrich dreams in South Africa and America, and part hopeful and yet melancholy tale of a son's mature understanding of his father, this book defies easy categorization as it casts its spell. With stylistic ease and elegance, Nixon (who teaches English at Columbia) tells a story that is greater than its parts. At its core lies the ostrich, that "goofy gargantuan" that throughout history has "feathered our dreams more luxuriantly than any other bird." While readers will learn more than they ever imagined knowing about the strange bird, Nixon deftly turns their interest to the assorted dreamers who sought their fortunes in its gorgeous feathers, meat or skin--the South African ostrich ranchers of his childhood, the wave of pogrom-fleeing Lithuanian Jews, as well as Afrikaners and Scots, who settled in the Karoo to raise ostriches, and, finally, the newest wave of ostrich enthusiasts in the American Southwest in the 1980s. Nixon narrates these tales in all their fascinating glory and tragedy, presenting a rich socioeconomic tale of the ostrich's rise and decline during the 20th century. Tugging at this alternatingly humorous and bizarre background is the author's honest and fresh attempt to revisit two ghosts from his past--his father, a self-taught botanist and gardening columnist for a local newspaper, and South African apartheid. Nixon has succeeded in tying it all together into a tantalizing read. Who would have suspected that ostriches could provide the ballast for such a moving memoir? Agent, Bill Hamilton. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Picador USA; First Thus edition (March 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312270127
• ISBN-13: 978-0312270124
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,094,715 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Dream of the Heart, March 28, 2000

By 

LLL "L" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dreambirds [Dream Birds]: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune (Hardcover)

Dreambirds is the best book I've read in very, very long time--the sort of story you find yourself remembering images and lines from for days. This is a book you will immediately pass to a friend or give as a gift: it's that good. Rob Nixon's story is really two stories in one: a wonderfully colorful and wholly original mix of personal history, memoir, and the outward history of a dream in the shape of a large, clumsy, often ill-tempered and fascinating bird: the ostrich. Nixon's exotic childhood unfolds on the far edge of the South African desert, the Karoo, site of a great ostrich rush years before, and scenes of his touchingly quirky family, memories of his father, and his boyhood dreams are rendered with an honest tenderness and true heart. Interspersed are the reflections of the adult Nixon, chapters on ostrich fact, history, and lore, and fantastical tales of what man does in the name of following--even owning--a dream: the ostrich farmers who risk everything and lose, and Nixon himself, who risks all and wins us over on every page. Dreambirds might be compared to William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways or Ian Frazier's Great Plains, but it is more than simply a reflection of the natural world. Rob Nixon is a naturalist who has turned his love of the world inward too--to family, the past, and the most exotic land of all: our vanished childhoods. He is a naturalist of the human heart. Don't be fooled by the ostriches on the cover! Or do! They truly become dreambirds in this great and touching book. You'll love it!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Desert Dreams, April 9, 2000

By 

James Michael McColly - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dreambirds [Dream Birds]: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune (Hardcover)

Rob Nixon's Dreambirds is the journey reminiscent of perhaps our finest writers today--of Naipaul, Rushdie, W.B Sebald and others--, exiles who float between past and present, continent to continent, yet writing as if they have never truly left the childhood landscapes lost to them in the political, cultural and economic upheavals of the modern world. Written in a meditative and at times even dreamlike prose, Nixon introduces us to his family, like him, keen observers of the natural world of South Africa, which becomes for them a means to identify with a land and culture far removed from their Northern European roots. Nixon's memoir is held together by the story of the ostrich, the dreambird, which attracted flocks of pioneers to South Africa's Karoo desert region hoping to make their fortunes on the feathers of this mysterious remnant from prehistoric times. As Nixon tells the story of South Africa's pioneers who banked their dreams on the plumes of the ostrich, we not only learn of the fascinating natural history of the ostrich, but of Nixon's own affection for a world he could never quite feel at home in but savors nevertheless. The politics of South Africa are of course never too far away from Nixon's meditations on how his family and his life were shaped by the ostrich boon. In his restrained prose, one feels the ever present weight of South Africa's troubled double world of black and white, a world Nixon knows he can never escape. This consciousness of the racial divide of his people seeps into nearly every encounter and story, and it's Nixon's gift that he never has to directly speak about what it must feel like to carry the weight of remorse of South Africa's colonial past. He doesn't have to because it is obvious in the choices he makes to weave into his narrative the stories of ostrich ranchers and political activists which he goes to great lengths to balance with that of his own poetic self-examination. The narrative takes one more turn when Nixon moves to America, a place more like South Africa than Americans would like to believe according to Nixon. Here he hopes to put behind him the conflicted emotions surrounding his homeland and the memories of the delicate desert landscape of his youth. After living for a few years in New York, a place Nixon describes as ironically forgiving for emigrants like him, he takes a trip to Arizona to do some travel writing and discovers to his surprise the similarities of the Sonoran Desert to that of his Karoo. There too Nixon finds that the pioneer spirit of the American West is alive and well and not all that different from that of what he remembers from back home. And once again, in flies or rather runs the dreambird, the ostrich, but no longer raised for its flamboyant feathers for fashionable women, but to be fattened, fired over the grill and fed to health-conscious Americans. The get-rich schemes of his ancestors have come back in force in Arizona in the form of the ostrich cowboys. And for nothing else one should read this book for Nixon's comic observations of the surreal world of the modern American West. Dreambirds is a memoir that never quite feels like a memoir, as Nixon deftly lets his own story and that South Africa's reflect through his sensitive observations of the human spirit and how it is revealed to us again and again by the land and its innocent inhabitants that continue to survive despite our reckless dreams to live at their expense.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Review of Dreambirds, April 5, 2000

By 

N. & R. Jones (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dreambirds [Dream Birds]: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune (Hardcover)

In "Dreambirds," Rob Nixon begins with a memory of a particular (omnivorous, as it happens) ostrich of his childhood, then explores the surprisingly pervasive role of ostriches in his personal history, in the settlement of his hometown and nearby "feather boomtowns," and finally in the new American West, where ranchers value ostrich hide and meat in place of plumes. His journeys lead him to provocative considerations of settlement and exile, from the nineteenth-century Lithuanian Jews who were lured to Africa as feather prospectors to an American couple who left Illinois to make rattlesnake crafts in the Arizona desert. Most compelling, however, is Nixon's candid look at the migrations in his own family history and his troubled relationship with his homeland. With a flair for anecdote and a mix of humor and compassion, he inhabits his childhood self as vividly as he inhabits the dramatic landscape of the South African desert--and in so doing, transforms both worlds from foreign to familiar. Rob Nixon's book is an inspiration to the memoirist who envisions a place for his or her story in the global currents of history and migration; it is equally an inspiration to the scholar who pursues in print that elusive, fruitful union between the political and the personal, between researched fact and fantasy.