Customer Reviews

The Emperor's Giraffe: And Other Stories Of Cultures In Contact

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This is a wonderful, well written collection of essays on historical cultural contacts. I particularly enjoyed Wilson's essays on Native American retribution ... Wilson offers a balanced discourse on the tension between archaeologists and Native Americans. Highly recommended!

When I picked up The Emperor's Giraffe, I was hoping for more stories like the title, and less of the fairly well-covered territory of encounters of Europeans and Native Americans. Notable absences are of interactions with Africans, and the final essay, on trickster stories, seems out-of-place and woefully inadequate.

So, as a light introduction to first encounters of cultures, this is a good place to start. But if you're looking for something more in depth or intellectually challenging, look elsewhere.

This book is a collection of 23 short essays Wilson wrote for Natural History, under the theme of "early contact"--mostly between Europe and the Americas. Almost every piece is interesting in one way or another, although the few that challenge popular myths stand out as exceptional: one about the "real" Christopher Columbus, and another about the origins of Thanksgiving. The emphasis is on Wilson's own area of the specialization (the Caribbean and Latin America) so your own enjoyment may depend on your level of interest in that region. The most interesting of these to me was a piece about the history of Jewish culture in the Caribbean. The book would make a good, bite-sized companion to Jared Diamond's outstanding work, Guns, Germs, and Steel.