Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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!!

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.

I can't praise this book highly enough; I second everything in the foregoing reader comments. The book manages to pull off an awesome coup, explaining Mr. Wilson's work without demystifying it, and emotionally paralleling the author's own discovery process with the reader's. A unique and wonderful book, not least because while it's an enlightening and frequently hilarious read, even as it keeps you entertained, it subtly, unpretentiously, and subversively changes the way you look at the world. I'm giving it five stars; I wish I could give a hundred times as many.

I can't think of another book that has so altered my perception of how we process new information in a world full of unexpected and remarkable scientific "wonders." Are we easily duped? Are we natural non-believers or natural believers? Weschler really gets us going about objects found in the "Museum of Jurassic Technology" in L.A., then suddenly we're caught short - is the Director of the Museum kidding Weschler, just to prove a point about how gullible we are? Is WESCHLER making it all up? Is this book itself a curio from a "cabinet of wonder" and are we being asked to accept it as non-fiction? Does the Museum exist? (I even tried to find it in the L.A. phone book when I visited - couldn't find it. Curiouser and curiouser....does anyone out there know for sure?) This book made me want to go sit in on graduate-level classes in Museology - how do museum professionals really decide what information will go on those little cards next to the e! xhibits in museums? How easily convinced are we by the authority of those stark, compact little "explanations" that what we are seeing is what they tell us we are seeing - especially in situations where we have very little ability to check out the infomation? Can we believe the unbelievable? Should we? How do museums - how does anyone, really - manipulate the way information is delivered to the uninformed or the unconvinced? Weschler keeps his readers wonderfully off-balance about what he's describing - we are often half-way to believing impossible information because that information comes wrapped up with the bows & ribbons of an exclusive academic vocabulary. Weschler brings in the phenomena of "cabinets of wonder", brought back from the New World to the Old, full of objects which we know now to be real but which seemed marvelous and almost surreal at the time. This whole book is like a trip through a carnival House of Mirrors - you're just never quit! e sure that what you're seeing is real. Delightful and thou! ght-provoking in absolutely every way. And it's short to boot - no excuse not to sit right down and read it. Then read it again because you were so perplexed the first time through. Then give a copy to a friend.

Weschler's animated look at the 'asthetically just' museum curator David Wilson and an examination, in the book's second part, of the history of 'Wonder-cabinets' from the sixteenth century to the present day is a fascinating mix of profile, historical inquiry, and detective story. David Wilson and his museum are almost too good to be true and should encourage anyone who can get to Los Angeles to visit the MJT. The prose throughout is superb: Weschler is a master at making people talk on the page, and his own thoughts are conveyed in a prose that mimics colloquial speech -- a murderously difficult thing to do. I have read all of Weschler's books, and this, I think, is his very best.

Wechler's exploration of wonder through the objects contained in David Wilson's store-front museum in Culver City, California is truly thought-provoking, often subversive. Gratefully, we are often suspended in the what seems to be the same world of belief/disbelief created by Mr. Wilson's remarkable conjurations. Part mystery story (what items in the museum are actual, what are embroideries of facts and what are out and out hoaxes, and more mundanely, where did Wilson get the idea for that strange collection of cities listed in the frontispiece of his catalogs) and part meditation on the history of wonder (and anti-wonder) as exemplified in the museum from the early modern period to the present day, Mr. Wechsler tells us about the work David Wilson in such a way as to excite our enjoyment and intellectual play. One can only hope that this book will create enough interest in the work of Museum of Jurassic Technology to keep it going for a long, long time. Next time I'm in Los Angeles, it'll be my very first stop. Great illustrations, too!

The photographs and engravings reproduced in Lawrence Weschler's book are poignant and riveting. They account for the 2 stars in my rating. And David Wilson is indeed a "national treasure," as is his unsettling museum. This book, however, seems to me a snide, yuppie's-eye-view of a truly original person and his meticulously wondrous contribution to the long history of the wonder-cabinet. I was depressed for quite a while after reading it to think that this condescending and anti-intellectual account would bear Wilson's mind and seditious achievements out into the world so much more frequently than would the Museum of Jurassic Technology itself, or its own publications. People fated to live out imaginatively impoverished lives in latter-day American society could use some capacity for self-loss in the face of what is other than ourselves or what we have mastered. And--perhaps less fundamentally, but in the interests of our being less boring to each other--we could use a less pervasive culture of knowingness. *Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder* brings that possibility forward only to smother it in a kind of smugly affectionate ridicule for the person who tried to give us a chance. I was particularly disappointed in that Weschler's 80s New Yorker piece about Boggs was both intriguing and respectful, and his original Harper's piece on Wilson at least showed honest curiosity. The book is a failure for a writer who had seemed to have an interesting mission. People interested in Wunderkammern of the past, as Wilson himself is and as Weschler's irrepressible condescension demonstrates he is finally not, should look at the catalogue of Dartmouth's Hood Museum exhibit and conference on them, edited by Joy Kenseth, *The Age of the Marvelous*; Paula Findlen's *Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park's *Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1100-1750*, and Rosamond Purcell and Stephen J. Gould's glorious *Finders, Keepers: Treasures and Oddities of Natural History*. All are profusely illustrated; Purcell's photographs in the last are works of art in themselves.

Well, the editorial reviews above tell you about as much as you should know about this book pre-reading it. Put abstractly, this book is about what is real and what isn't, who says so and most importantly, about _wonder_.

You know how you think you have a handle on how big the world is and what it contains? And then you see or read or hear something than makes you realize how small your view is? After reading this book, I felt the space inside my head get bigger to accomodate all the things I hadn't considered.

I'm a small lending library with several copies of this title around to get more folks reading this brilliant book. Although this should be required reading for all inquisitive types, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder is a fantastic read for folks heading off to college - especially grad school - because it gets you asking good questions about schalorship, what we know and what we don't know.

This is a wonderful, compelling book. The notion of wonder is approached in a way that gives one pause to wonder about what's become of wonder in our own lives. I was especially taken by Weschler's idea that the discovery of the New World was a key event in inspiring all those wacky, creative, nutty people to collect everything and anything. It makes me smile to think what it must have been like for those individuals to contemplate the news of discoveries made in the New World. What an exciting period in the history of ideas. Weschler conveys this excitement and sense of wonder beautifully; he's an elegant, graceful and funny writer. And Mr Wilson is a wonder himself in every way. This is a terrific book and it will change the way you look at your world, wherever that might be.