MR. WILSON'S CABINET OF WONDER: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Techno logy [Hardcover]

Lawrence Weschler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 10, 1995

Writing with great style and humor, Weschler guides the readers through the Museum of Jurassic Technology and through the mind of its curator, David Wilson, a man of unusual imagination who mounts exhibits such as spore-inhaling ants, bats deploying ultraviolet frequencies, peach-pit carvings, and other exhibits that seem the manifest definition of bizarre. Illustrations.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian space between the walls of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles exist bats that can fly through lead barriers, spore-ingesting pronged ants, elaborate theories of memory, and a host of other off-kilter scientific oddities that challenge the traditional notions of truth and fiction. Lawrence Weschler's book, expanded from an article for Harper's, is, at turns, a tour of the museum, a profile of its founder and curator, David Wilson, and a meditation on the role of imagination and authority in all museums, in science and in life. Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder is an exquisite piece of "magic realist nonfiction" that will prove utterly captivating.

From Publishers Weekly

As in previous books such as Shapinsky's Karma, Boggs's Bills and Other True-Life Tales, Weschler, a staff writer for the New Yorker, explores with detail and delight some knotty questions of culture and trickery. The first half of the book is an expanded version of an article he wrote for Harper's and ruminates about the little-known Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, querying its elfin, straight-faced founder/proprietor, David Wilson, and tracking the detailed yet mainly bogus tales behind Wilson's elaborate sham artifacts. Such adventures lead Weschler to muse on the nature of museums and of wonder, and, in the book's second half, to recount the further investigations spurred by readers' letters. The impulse to inventory oddities, he observes, dates back to Europeans' wonderment at the New World. Wilson, he concludes, has tapped "into the premodern wellsprings of the postmodern temper." Slight, but memorable. Illustrations.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 163 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (October 10, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679439986
• ISBN-13: 978-0679439981
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #820,302 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book, highly recommended., April 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Techno logy (Paperback)

This is a wonderful book. It's beautifully written and captures perfectly the spirit of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. By the way, the Museum is real -- I've been there. I wandered in not knowing what it was and was immediately hooked. Having read this book, I like the Museum even more. David Wilson is a national treasure.

One recommendation to anyone lucky enough to read this book: don't flip through and look at the pictures first. Read it from beginning to end as it was intended, or you'll ruin the story.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A new way to view museums, November 1, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Techno logy (Paperback)

What is a museum? Are the things we see in a museum "the truth", and how did they come to be so? These questions and others fill Lawrence Weschler's marvelous extended essay, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder. Weschler takes as his jumping-off point the very real "Museum of Jurassic Technology," privately owned and operated in Los Angeles by David Wilson. In this book, Wechsler tells how European museums began as private collections of "wonder-ful" objects, with the focus less on whether the object was "true" than whether it evoked amazement. Many of the objects in Wilson's "Museum" appear real, and are described in the dry, precise prose known to museum viewers around the world. But they are not real. Or are they? This short (168 pages, with endnotes) book examines both the "wonders" of Wilson's storefront museum and the even more astounding wonders of the real world in gifted and sprightly prose. Not to be missed!!

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An artifact of the wondrous Jurassic, December 5, 2001

By 

Jonathan Rimorin (Cormorant Island) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Techno logy (Paperback)

I read this book after visiting the beautiful and strange Museum of Jurassic Technology. I was first discomfited to find that the Museum's wonders could be -- how could they be? -- frauds and hoaxes. I was at first crushed and a little annoyed at Mr Weschler's seeming cynicism-- unlike me, he had apparently rushed immediately out to fact-check the exhibits' provenance, and gleefully points out how most visitors had been hoodwinked. However, Mr Weschler moves from simple cynicism to a greater appreciation of the Museum's gnomic aims, and the reader moves with him from everyday disbelief and sour disgruntlement to a rapturous awe. A magnificent book, and a worthy addition to study of the Lower Jurassic.