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Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy

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Still Life is the kind of book that makes you want to be a journalist. With the skill of a secret agent, Melissa Milgrom insinuated herself into the surreal world of taxidermy. She made friends with all of the major players, and was able to write a book with an unbelievably broad scope.

What I loved about the book was the way it jumped from present day to historic. She fleshed out her observations (pun intended), by exploring their historical context. I really enjoyed learning about the Smithsonian and AMNH from the taxidermists perspective. These are two of my favorite museums in the world, and my appreciation for them has certainly been deepened by Still Life.

Not only did she observe taxidermists, but she became one. She stuck her head in the fetid stench of a pickling barrel. She was up to her elbows in squirrel blood. It was GREAT! She even wrote objectively about the "constructive criticism" her squirrel got at a competition.

One warning: I like to read a book while I'm eating dinner. You can't do that with this book. Milgrom's descriptions are way too graphic for mealtime reading. Any other time of the day, though, the book is great.

Taxidermy. The word brings to mind Alfred Hitchcock's creepy Norman Bates. Or maybe it reminds you of Roy Rogers' horse, Trigger, lovingly preserved in the Roy Rogers Museum. Either way, it just seems weird.

Journalist Melissa Milgrom starts her book on taxidermy by playing to our prejudices. The father and son team she hangs out with to learn about the taxidermy trade are at times defensive about their craft, and at other times exuberantly ghoulish. It's a little unsettling.

Having lured us into the strange world of recreating life with carcasses, Milgrom then reminds us of all the displays we've seen at natural history museums, including The Smithsonian, and how it allows us to see wild animals close up in natural-looking settings. Taxidermy's not just jackalopes and trophy fish.

Milgrom takes us to the 2003 World Taxidermy Championships, where the overwhelmingly male population of taxidermists show off their best works. Coincidentally, this is the same event that Susan Orlean wrote about in her article "Lifelike" in The New Yorker that same year. Orlean's article also appears in the The Best American Essays 2004. The article caught some of the atmosphere of the gathering - typically exuberant convention behavior with a side order of the macabre.

Milgrom's description of the event points up the unexpectedly political side of taxidermists. The "Our Father" and singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner" before the awards ceremony alert us to the conservative nature of the group. Then there's the sponsorship of the Championships by the National Rifle Association and hunting groups as well as the stars-and-stripes motifs decorating the members' baseball caps and t-shirts. Many of the taxidermists are also hunters, or at the very least, support hunters. Those moose heads and bear statues weren't all road kill, y'know.

As interesting as the American story of taxidermy is, Still Life really took off for me when Milgrom met up with a British taxidermist, Emily Mayer. Mayer works with the edgy conceptual artist Damien Hirst, who often features human skulls and animal carcasses in his works. The works are always controversial and neither Mayer nor Hirst apologize or make excuses for their often gruesome depictions of death. I was surprised by the detour into the British art world, and fascinated.

The history of British taxidermy is also quirkier than the American history. In Victorian times, taxidermy really took off in Britain, with stuffed animals a common piece of décor in many homes. Also popular at the time were whimsical taxidermical tableaux of kitten weddings or fairy tale characters, as well as believe-it-or-not style displays of two-headed pigs and other oddities. Those crazy Victorians.

Two extremely different sides of taxidermy come together near the end of the book when our old friend Emily Mayer attends the 2005 World Taxidermy Championships. Although Melissa Milgrom is somewhat distracted by having entered her own first attempt at taxidermy in the competition, it appears that the avant-garde Mayer got along famously with the good ol' boys of American taxidermy. Taxidermy, with or without politics, makes strange bedfellows.

Ms. Milgrom really gets into the nitty gritty of taxidermy the art in this book. She shadows some of the worlds greatest taxidemists and gets into superb detail regarding the art as well as the science of taxidermy. I picked this book on a lark thinking it was mostly into photography but that is not the case at all. In fact, as she gets immersed in the art she actually takes it up herself. Taxidermy is an important way to chronicle the science of comparative anatomy. If it weren't for some famous taxidermists such as John J Audubon we would not have a look at many extinct species. But,this book gets into more than the science of taxidermy, it touches the soul of taxidermy. What some may see as morbid or even downright animal cruelty is shed in a whole new, interesting light. Some may shudder at the thought of this profession, but if you read this you will see it totally diferently.

Melissa Milgrom, Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

For some reason, I always seem to leave nonfiction to stew for quite a while before I review it. I finished this book close to two months ago (April 24th, and I'm writing the opening of this review on June 22nd) and still am not entirely sure what to say about it. I had the same problem with Bella Bathurst's The Wreckers, and while I didn't like this one quite as much as I liked that one, I still enjoyed this a great deal. So why is it that once again I find myself with so little to say that I'm padding this review with a paragraph of, essentially, nothingness? I don't have an answer. You probably don't either.

In any case, I once again discover evidence of my phenomenal thick-skulled-ness as it relates to certain issues. One of the prevailing themes of Milgrom's book is that taxidermy has been a fringe trade at the best of times over the centuries (and an outcast one at the worst of times), and she traces the history of the discipline with that thought never far from the surface. You know what? I never noticed. I always figured taxidermy was confined to hunting lodges and silly restaurants because that's where the hunters were, rather than there being some sort of invisible/artificial class barrier keeping stuffed animals out of finder drawing rooms everywhere. (As always, I'm simply ignoring the existence of the groups who try to have it criminalized, etc. They're not worth noticing, unless they're flinging paint on your fur.) And in that regard, this was quite an eye-opening book. Sometimes prejudice has to be pointed out to you before you see it.

The other tack Milgrom takes as she illuminates this much-neglected world is "taxidermy is an art, just as much as, say, sculpture." (Not a tossoff comparison, that, as Milgrom spends a decent amount of time with Damien Hirst's go-to taxidermist.) If you've read some books on the creation of art, you'll recognize Milgrom's language here, and to me at least it's a convincing argument; there's a lot of know-how and more than a little "you've gotta be born with it" to be had from everyone Milgrom spends time with. Ultimately, that's what art is.

I sometimes go out of my way to read books on subjects that normally I don't think I'd find interesting. I like to test my philosophy that any subject can be made interesting given the right author. And so far I've batted a thousand, whether it be microscopic parasites, the history of sewers, or an overview of taxidermy. There's a lot of fun nonfiction out there, and this qualifies. Worth checking out even if you don't think you have an interest in the subject. *** ½

I will preface this review by stating that before reading this book, I knew nothing about the art of taxidermy. Sure, I made fun of that silly website with all of the squirrels doing strange things in dioramas. My good Wisconsin friend and I joked about taking a road trip to the museum with all of those stuffed squirrels. Instead we went to The House on The Rock which is another story altogether.

I also used to make fun of the stuffed Jackalope that a friend had in college. Another very gullible friend (who I will call "Lee" because that is what his name is) used to think that the Jackalope was real because, well, that was an *actual* Jackalope.

From reading this book, I discovered that taxidermy is even more strange, wonderful and down right weird than I ever imagined. I'm not sure that I would want to give it a shot myself (as the author did) but it's still interesting.

The book is a quick read and kept my attention. I like that in a book.

Melissia Milgrom has written a fun book that widely covers the modern state of taxidermy. She immediately gravitated to the best in the world, taxidermists to the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian, and was readily granted access to homes and laboratories where freezers are stuffed with carcasses and pickling buckets hold penguins, squirrels, secret family recipes, and ungodly stenches. Milgrom traces the history of taxidermy to its heyday when every English village had one, and a Victorian taxidermist became the rockstar of that era. In the U.S. taxidermy has the slightly disreputable whiff of redneck wonderland, whereas the British are more tolerant of quaint eccentricities. North American taxidermists work with a chip on their shoulders, blaming the tree hugger mentality for their own seedy reputation, such that there are mounts you could display quite freely in England that you would not dare to show in the U.S.
The author also visits with Emily Mayer and Damien Hirst. Hirst is a famous sculptor who does unusual things like sectioned cows, so that you can literally walk through a bisected animal, in other words his work can be a tad disturbing. But Milgrom spends far more time with Hirsts's interesting partner, Mayer, who is an outsider even amongst taxidermists, relying on a process called erosion molding. Mayer mummifies animals in silicone and then proceeds to rot the animal out of the mold and then uses the mold to re-cast the animal. "A mere sculptor," sniff many taxidermists, but the level of skill and patience required for Mayer's work is every bit as demanding as the best in taxidermy. 'Still Life' is a brightly written book that illuminates a dusty little corner of our society, it starts in New Jersey, ends in New Jersey, and closes with Roy Orbison, now you can't get much better than that.

Sorry for the weak pun in the title but I think it sums up the strengths of Melissa Milgrom's book. She gives a novice's first-hand account of taxidermy, its practitioners and its history in a readable and visceral way. She occasionally overplays the gross-out factor and gets a bit meladramatic when describing her own foray into stuffing a squirrel but those are pretty minor criticisms of an otherwise clever and wide-ranging look at an art form that no longer gets the respect it deserves.

Milgrom investigates the different pressures facing commercial, museum and artistic taxidermists and paints a vivid portrait of the strong personalities that are involved. The sociopolitical and economic concerns that have pushed taxidermy from its former prominence and respectability are described neatly and with a tinge of regret by the author.

If you are reading about this book, you probably already have a strong idea of wether or not this is a subject you'll be able to read about. I can only offer my observation that the book is well-written and despite some areas that slow down the narrative, it is a quick read that left me with a far greater appreciation for the expertise and skill of taxidermists, particularly those who are able to bring intensive scientific study to bear on the posture and details of each animal.

This review is based on an advance copy.

When I first saw the cover of Melissa Milgrom's Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, I thought (and hoped) it would be much like Mary Roach's book "Stiff." After reading the first few chapters I realized that this was not the case. For example The first chapter William Schwendeman, the last chief taxidermist of the American Museum of Natural History, who is part of a family taxidermy business in Milltown, New Jersey. Chapter two follows a taxidermy competition in Springfield, Illinois that reminded me of a combination between a dog show and car show in the participant's obsession with detail, that separates winning and losing mounts. Milgrom also spends time with Emily Mayer, a British artist that uses taxidermy as a tool for making modern art. She also follows Ken Walker, a Canadian taxidermist who attempts to create a mount of a long extinct Irish Elk. I think though that may favorite chapter is on Victorian Mr.Potter's Museum of Curiosities that before it's recent auction featured cats dressed and mounted in every day human activities that came to be known as the grotesque school: weddings, working at a gristmill, and so on. It's hard not to imagine how this phenomenon must have influenced countless childrens books.

While "Still life" does contain many memorable people, which shouldn't be surprising since taxidermy is a relatively obscure art, Milgrom's writing is rarely laugh-out loud funny. Instead, still life is an ethnographic study of the culture surrounding still life. In addition to an overview that traces taxidermy as a way of preserving newly discovered wild life. It touches on some of the great taxidermists and the role it played in dioramas natural history museums and their eventual exodus as more interactive exhibits came about and it became somehow politically incorrect to have mounted animals in a museum.

Finally at the end of the book, Milgrom tries her hand at mounting a squirrel and entering it in a judged Taxidermy contest. Still Life is an engrossing book and readers who come to it with an open mind will learn who and why taxidermy is practiced.

There were a number of reasons I wanted to read this book. I've known some taxidermists and I admire their skill. Carl Akeley was a boyhood hero and I've had a lifelong interest in natural history.

A big game hunter in the town where my maternal grandparents lived displayed his mounted trophies in the large front window of his office. As a boy, I often stood there, admiring them, thinking of the places he'd been and the adventures he'd had.

Milgrom introduces the reader to a host of people, living and dead, who are equally as interesting as Akeley. She documents changing attitudes about natural history and the manner in which museums depict it, the conservatism of North American taxidermists in contrast to the more pragmatic Europeans, and a host of other interesting and thought-provoking tidbits.

As Milgrom notes, many consider the display of dead animals as freakish. Fortunately, she doesn't treat taxidermists as freaks. Those she interviewed reveal themselves as humble, hardworking and dedicated to their craft. Some are hunters while others won't kill to acquire specimens. Some may be eccentric, but none can be accurately labeled as freakish. Many will deny it, but the good ones are truly artists.

The author starts out curious but a bit squeamish about her subject and ends up an enthusiastic participant as she mounts and exhibits a squirrel in a national competition. She also gave us a well-written and thoroughly captivating book.

Admittedly, taxidermy is perhaps not as engaging a topic as dead humans or sex , but Melissa Milgrom's Still Life begs comparison with Mary Roach's "immersion journalism" works "Stiff" and "Bonk." It didn't hold my interest the way Roach's works did, perhaps because it lacked the focus necessary in a work dealing with a topic with which most readers are unfamiliar.

Milgrom does a pretty good job of balancing the serious side of stuffing dead animals with the inherent quirkiness of the practice and its parishioners. The historical progression of the "art" and the battle for respectability is interesting. However, my attention flagged as she introduced more characters and organizations than I could track.

Perhaps the topic strains to fill almost 300 pages of a non-technical treatise.