I started reading with Tarzan and have never quite gotten it out of my reading DNA. I enjoy historical literature. I want to be challenged with my perspectives when it comes to what are the causes & effects. Thus, when I came across this fine work, I just couldn't wait.
The story of Carl Akeley(THE taxidermist) is truly a gem. It not only takes place in the guilded age, but keenly focuses on the African safaris of the time, as that age nearly brings them, their big game, and native ways of life, & other entities toward extinction. The author has crafted, not only a wonderfully sensational gem of a story, but one that, unfortunately rhymes too well with today's guilded age, where there are no Carl Akely's, Theodore Roosevelts, and others(that grace these pages), who valiantly try to curb a growing & unsatiable form of destructive capitalism(that would be casino capitalism, in today's vernacular).
The evolution of the museums during this time is expressed in detail through the life span of Carl/But by the mid-1880s not only was the frontier conquered, it was closed. The world had become smaller. Yet inside the smaller world everything was in a fragile union.This ecumenical philosophy would ultimately become the model for all museums. The people of the time were well aware that the bison and passenger pigeon were not coming back.
There are so many stories within this book that are just amazing. For instance, there is the biggest animal of the time, the world famous Jumbo The Elephant. He is killed on railroad tracks by a locomtive! When they opened his stomach they found hatfuls of british pennies, nails, keys, rivets, metal screws, gold and siver coins, pebbles, gravel and one very well masticated police whistle. There are many fine stories throughout this work with such finely tuned details, wonderfully fascinating.
Events of the time/In May, Governor Jeremaiah Rusk had given his permission to fire on one thousand Polish workers who'd had the temerity to march on the Milwaulki Iron Company. It was the same week as the Haymarket riots in Chicago. Or/The first federal legislation to protect wildlife, the Lacey Act, had been passed largely thanks to a klatch of weel-to-do ladies in Boston who had formed a group called the Audobon Society. Or when they discovered a mass graveyard of dinosaurs/The evidence showed history was one giant boneyard of extinct species. That everything today merely existed on a bright and smoldering fringe of eternal eclipse.
Yet it is the characters that the author breathes life into, with such detail and superb writing, that I just couldn't keep the pages turning fast enough, to see what REALLY happened.
His descriptions throughout are spot on/Later, passing over a river, they had seen hippos crowded together, mouths like fanged bathtubs/She lit another cigarette and watched out the window: at this other, strange new world passing by, where telegraph wires were strung on poles extrahigh on behalf of giraffes.
His geopolitical anaylsis of the times/-Uganda was now of great strategic importance. After all, whoever controlled the Nile controlled Egypt/India was the colony that mattered most: for all those delectable, exquisite textiles. For its calicos from Calcutta, for its Indian silk moths, for its wool from the Himalayan mountain goats, and its cashmere harvested from the soft chins of the pashmina goats of Sringar. Here was the driving force behind imperialism: feathers, fur, and fleece.
It is the examination of extinction and its causes by the various characters of the times that is at the heart of this fine work and it is very prescient for our time/If unprepared to defend himself, to defend against corruption of the species(meaning can be layered in many ways, like an onion, throughout this fine book) that was taking place right now under his very nose, survival was doubtful.
Eugenics is also a predominate theme, and again, it rhymes with our times/The natural social heirarchies-those gentle but powerful laws dictating where each kind took its place in the Kingdom of America-were under threat now. The most elite, moneyed individuals in New York should perhaps feel uneasy sympathy with these great, powerful lizards. In the end, nothing had been able to save the dinosaurs-those uncontested aristocrats of the Mesozoic.
Captivity/The zoo broke the wild creature's spirit. Corrupted its moral. When I read that I thought of the book, The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris.
In the end, it was balance. This was my reading of it as expressed by one of the characters/But certainly, for both societies and organisms, competition was essential. That's what was wrong when the oil trust and coal trust and steel trust and the beef trust and the six great railroads and even the sugar trust excluded competition; when they excluded competition they acted against nature and imperiled the very health of the nation. It was no more healthy than the tendancy toward over specialization, a tendancy equally fatal for a species as for civilization.
A Great sory told in an entertaining & informative manner.
Truth, in this case, is not only stranger, but more powerful.
Truly superb in every since of the word.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!!!!!!
