Washington Post Book Reviews
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Monday November 29, 2010
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KINGDOM UNDER GLASS: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals
KINGDOM UNDER GLASS: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals, Jay Kirk
Henry Holt
ISBN 978-0805092820
387 pages
$27.50
THE SPECIES SEEKERS: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth, Richard Conniff
Norton
ISBN 978-0393068542
464 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
Until reading "Kingdom Under Glass," I didn't think it was possible to use the words "fascinating" and "taxidermy" in the same sentence (at least not with a straight face). Granted, Carl Akeley (1864-1926), the subject of "Kingdom Under Glass," was also an explorer and inventor, and this biography is spiced with accounts of his African expeditions and his offbeat marriage to a woman who came to prefer a monkey's companionship to his. But much of the book is about preserving dead animals, and fascinating it certainly is.
This is thanks to gonzo narration by Jay Kirk, who has also written on travel and true crime. His prose is daring -- sometimes even a bit wild -- and he worms his way convincingly into the minds of his subjects. That both Carl Akeley and his first wife, Mickie, were odd ducks plays into Kirk's restless hands.
In the book's early going, Akeley is a figure out of a Horatio Alger novel: a promising young taxidermist who is let go from Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, N.Y., after being caught sleeping on the job. But just as Akeley is about to give up and slink back to his parents' farm, his former employer rehires him. Jumbo the elephant has died after being struck by a train; his owner, P.T. Barnum, wants him preserved; and Professor Ward has belatedly recognized Ackley's exceptional artistry.
Akeley re-launches his career by bringing the world's most famous pachyderm back to a semblance of life. Over the next few years he moves from job to job and town and town, and his reputation grows: His stuffed animals and birds are more lifelike than anyone else's, and soon he's in New York City, freelancing for the Museum of Natural History. There he goes through one substance after another in search of the perfect filler for his creations: sawdust and rags (tends to sag), clay (tends to rot), plaster (just right).
He takes up with, lives with and finally marries Mickie, a game young woman who does not hang back when animals need to be killed or gutted. He dreams big, imagining the dioramas that will eventually make the Museum of Natural History a world-class attraction. Ever the perfectionist, he realizes that he must lead collecting expeditions to Africa and that Mickie must come along. Not only that, but when the movie camera he uses proves too cumbersome to record the vagaries of wild animals, he invents a new one; it's so handy that Robert Flaherty uses it to film the granddaddy of all documentaries, "Nanook of the North."
Akeley suffered from mood swings -- which seem to have been exacerbated by a growing distaste for all the slaughtering he did -- and so did Mickie. The story of their gradual estrangement is both sad and hilarious, especially after she becomes infatuated with that monkey, J.T. Not only is she so protective that she excludes Carl from the tent she shares with J.T. in Africa, but she brings the creature back to Manhattan, where it proceeds to rip everything in their apartment to shreds, including the wallpaper.
Kirk tells all this with gusto, although sometimes he reminds me of a fastball pitcher with control problems. He can craft delightfully original descriptions, such as the sight of Teddy Roosevelt (who met up with the Akeleys on safari) grinning with his "terrific biscuit box of flashing teeth." But then a few pages later, Kirk throws wild: "The honey on the table (was) entombed ... with dead bees." Sorry, but it's the bees that were entombed, not the honey. He should also fact-check more carefully. He claims that Roosevelt helped create enough national parks, forests and wildlife refuges to salt away "an entire fifth of the nation."
But the United States encompasses 2.3 billion acres, of which Roosevelt was instrumental in saving about 200 million -- a prodigious amount, but less than 10 percent of the whole.
Kirk's talent may need some disciplining, but there's a lot of it, and I look forward to his next book, even if it's on nothing more intrinsically exciting than taxidermy.
Richard Conniff's "The Species Seekers," by contrast, is rather bland. The problem may be that in covering the scientists and explorers who roamed the world trying to understand what a species is and how various ones might be related, the author took on too much. Here are all the main players -- from Carl Linnaeus to Charles Darwin to Mary Kingsley -- each given 20 or 30 intelligent pages. But the book reads like a compendium, and it might have been wiser to zero in on four or five principals, rather than the dozens we have here.
One of Conniff's mini-portraits is unforgettable, however: The pious 19th-century British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse felt so threatened by evolutionary theory that he wrote a whole, crazed book to refute it. His basic argument was that God had planted fossils to give the Earth a past it didn't really have (by the same token, Adam and Eve would have had navels). Everybody and everything, the idea seemed to be, needs a background.
I think it's fair to say that under no circumstances would Gosse have let his wife room with a monkey.
Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com He is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THREE BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY
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ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA
Reviewed by Stephen Loman
Beginning with a survey of war images, moving on to a study of a single snapshot and finishing with a look at a few family photographs, these three new books examine photography from every angle.
1. "The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence," by Susie Linfield (Univ. of Chicago, $30). If we look at a photo of a Holocaust victim taken by a Nazi, are we degrading the dead all over again? "Rejectionists," as Linfield calls the critics, would argue that when we look at the vulnerable from our position of safety, it is akin to placing ourselves in the physical and moral position of the Nazi photographer. Linfield disagrees. In her unnerving examination of violent images (from limbless children in Sierra Leone to abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib), she explores how viewers respond to such images and reminds us of "photography's role in revealing injustice, fighting exploitation, and furthering human rights."
2. "The Boy: A Holocaust Story," by Dan Porat (Hill and Wang , $26). Porat's starting point is an iconic photo taken of a young boy raising his arms as Nazis confront him in the Warsaw Ghetto. Porat investigates the events surrounding the photo, separates truth from fiction, and tells the tragic story of five lives that intersected at that moment on a spring day in 1943. While the book is an examination of a particular photo, it's also a wide-angle reflection on "the kind of mythmaking perpetuated by photographs."
3. "Framing Innocence: A Mother's Photographs, a Prosecutor's Zeal, and a Small Town's Response," by Lynn Powell (New Press, $25.95). If you photograph your naked child, is the picture pornography? Cynthia Stewart thought she was taking pictures of her 8-year-old daughter "goofing in the bathtub." To the lab technician who developed the film, however, they looked like child porn. The author, who lived down the street from Stewart, details the shocking story of an Ohio mom who, 10 years ago, was arrested, put on trial and faced a 16-year prison sentence because of two family photos.
Stephen Lowman can be reached at lowmans(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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