Customer Reviews

The Extinction Club

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I picked this book up on the bargain rack of my local bookstore. I don't like to pass up a chance for a low-priced hardcover, and am I ever glad I didn't.

Everyone will tell you this book is about deer. Not just any deer. Rare deer. But it's about so much more than that. Whether you see it as fact or fiction, or 'mostly true', the book is captivating. While seemingly hare-brained and madcap in its construction, the text flows together in a surreal way. Twigger penned the words perfectly, and it's a book not only for deer-lovers, but for writers, too.

Because much of the book is about writing another book and finding book stores and raiding libraries and the like, anyone who loves books should also love it. I suppose I must have gotten lucky, liking both books and deer, with a slight bent for villains like the Major.

It's hard to do the text justice. You'll just have to go read it yourself, I suppose.

I also picked this up on the bargain rack. I was expecting a sort of research text on the deer. It actually is much more than that--it's part travelogue and part personal journey on the part of the author as well. He relates to us strange stories of bizarre people he meets in his research, thoughts on reading, various bits and pieces of history, and an ongoing story about trying to find a secondhand bookstore in Cairo. As I read it, I was enjoying it, but it felt rather fractured...up until the last few pages where he brings all the threads into the book together into one common theme, making me shake my head at the control he had over the various stories all along.

An amazing, entertaining, illuminating and yet at times even infuriating piece of work.

At its base, the book is about the pere david deer, a species that exists only to be hunted. Extinct in the wild for hundreds if not thousands of years, a herd of deer stayed alive in a walled-off compound in China's Forbidden City for several centuries, where only the emperor was allowed to hunt them and eat their meat. A Western monk "discovered" the deer in the late 19th Century, and sent a few back to Europe, where they were admired for their unusual appearance. Soon after, a combination of factors during the Boxer Rebellion wiped out the Chinese herd, leaving a small British herd as the only survivors. The population now thrives, and some have even been returned to China, but the herds are essentially kept alive through money earned by rich folks paying thousands of dollars to shoot them.

But Twigger's book is much more than that. It's an examination of how he came to write the book; it's a personal history; it's a book full of self-doubts and false starts; it's an extended treatise on the nature of extinction (both of species and of skills). It jumps around from idea to idea, from setting to setting, from time period to time period, never telling a cohesive story until it all comes together in the end. At times, the book is so unusual it reads like fiction. (Reading the book, I began to doubt the pere david deer even existed, but a quick Google search found several photos of them online.)

Ultimately, this is an entertaining and thought-provoking book, even if it is a bit self-indulgent. Worth checking out.

Q: When is a book about an endangered ungulate not a book about an endangered ungulate?

A: When it is written by Robert Twigger.

The Extinction Club is Twigger's story about Père David's deer, Elaphurus davidianus. It is considered by the ICUN as extinct in the wild, but it exists in zoos and zoological parks (as well as some hunting reserves) throughout the world.

In China, its origin, the Père David's deer was called the milu. It became a species linked to the Chinese Emperors, and then disappeared down human gullets following the Boxer Rebellion. Or so claims Twigger.

This slim book (222 pages) focuses less on milu and more on Twigger himself. Occasionally, he attempts to develop commentary on extinction and sustainability, but he never develops a compelling reason to even be interested in this deer other than the book will bring him money, which he needs. He never really goes beyond discussing the oddity of the deer's appearance and its recent history. A term paper on this animal, using the information Twigger collected, probably would not receive a passing grade.

"Milu was described as having the head of a deer, the hooves of a cow, the tail of a mule, and the neck of a camel" (p. 157). I read this multiple times.

Unfortunately, for a book that unapologetically is about the author as much as an animal, neither comes across as interesting. And that is the failure of this book.

this book, found as others in the sales stack has been one of the best pickups of the last year.

A good, and interesting read.

I got about halfway through this book before realizing that I was just trying to get back some of my time investment. I hoped that it would become spellbinding and hilarious any second. I kept hoping and hoping, until my next requested library book became available and I realized that it was more appealing than the book (this one) that I had already started.

The author really did seem to be just listing all the ways he got around writing a book about these nearly extinct deer. I don't know if he did this to stretch the book by a few hundred pages, but I found it dull. Too bad, too, because his tone was enjoyable to read.

An unoriginal attempt of authoring a novel based on fractured accounts through the masculine line of the Twigger family tree. The book reminds me of a Simon Winchester styled writer who is too preoccupied with glorify his own accomplishments. I have read three Twigger books and so far they are lacking in story but not autobiography.

The legendary deer known as the Milu, was thought to be extinct until a Basque missionary, Pere David stumbled upon them in the Chinese emperor's private park in the second half of the 19th century. Pere David smuggled a specimen to Europe igniting in the process, a clamour among several European nations to acquire a live animal. Eventually the Boxer rebellion led to the deer's extirpation from China but a herd survived in England on the private estate of the 11th Duke of Bedford. Robert Twigger's tale is a mix of whimsical, sometimes cheeky romps through history, and modern day divergences into the meaning of truth, myths and evolution.