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A sweeping historical narrative of the life of Carl Akeley, the famed explorer and taxidermist who changed the way Americans viewed the conservation of the natural world During the golden age of safaris in the early twentieth century, one man set out to preserve Africa's great beasts. In this epic account of an extraordinary life lived during remarkable times, Jay Kirk follows the adventures of the brooding genius who revolutionized taxidermy and created the famed African Hall we visit today at New York's Museum of Natural History. The Gilded Age was drawing to a close, and with it came the realization that men may have hunted certain species into oblivion. Renowned taxidermist Carl Akeley joined the hunters rushing to Africa, where he risked death time and again as he stalked animals for his dioramas and hobnobbed with outsized personalities of the era such as Theodore Roosevelt and P. T. Barnum. In a tale of art, science, courage, and romance, Jay Kirk resurrects a legend and illuminates a fateful turning point when Americans had to decide whether to save nature, to destroy it, or to just stare at it under glass.… (more)
User reviews
Review: There is a way of writing narrative non-fiction, and in particular narrative history and biography, that works to balance fact and speculation and to bring the story and the subject to fore while letting the author's presence recede into the background. I've read multiple books that do this successfully - The Devil in the White City and The Lost City of Z, among others - and I've no doubt that it's the style Kirk was shooting for in Kingdom Under Glass. Unfortunately, he missed the mark: Kirk's style of narrative vacillates between reproducing conversations and even inner thoughts without so much as a qualifier, to presenting entire scenes where every verb is slapped with a "might have," and every inference or interpretation is defended almost belligerently in the endnotes. In general, his authorial voice comes through on every page, as though he didn't trust the story to be interesting enough on its own.
Even forgiving the strange biographer's shenanigans, Kirk's prose style just didn't sit well with me. There were lots of strange sentence constructions and random fragments, and a tendency to inflate the writing with more two-dollar words (occasionally used slightly incorrectly) than were necessary. I got a sense that he had no problem playing fast and loose with the language and the facts if he thought his interpretation sounded better. For example, there's some nice alliteration in the phrase "while the mastodon's skeleton macerated in a brick tank the size of an aquarium...", but unfortunately what Kirk is actually talking about is an elephant, not a mastodon; a telling mistake in a book that's likely to be of interest to people who know something about zoology.
But even forgiving the narrative style *and* the prose, I still had a hard time getting involved with the story. Akeley lead an interesting life, no doubt, but he's not a particularly likable or sympathetic subject for a biography. To me, a ten-year-old who spends his summers skinning squirrels in his bedroom does not say "misunderstood future genius" so much as "potential sociopath," and his thirty-year-old self's "romance" with a fifteen-year-old runaway who was more than a little mentally unbalanced herself read as equally creepy. Neither Carl nor his wife particularly grew on me as the story progressed - rather the opposite, in fact; Mickie got so obnoxious that I started to wish for a lion to eat her and put us all out of our misery - and my favorite parts were when the story focused more on the Akeley's associates and acquaintances.
For all of that, however, I'm still not sorry I read this book. When I was a child, I loved natural history museums second only to zoos, and I did learn quite a bit about the origin and creation of the animal dioramas that always fascinated yet repulsed me. Also, Kirk paints a very good picture of the tail end of the Gilded Age and the gradual waning of the safari craze, and all of the accompanying attitudes and prejudices of the time, which is not a topic that I've read much about. (I do wish that there had been a little more time spent on the founding of the first gorilla preserve and the shift to conservationism that was hinted at in the title, however.) Overall, while I did learn something, and I appreciate the introduction to a person and a topic I might not otherwise have thought much about, I didn't care much for its packaging, and probably would have been better served reading one of Akeley's own books, or other contemporary memoirs. 2.5 out of 5 stars.
Recommendation: While Kirk's style might work for others more than it did for me, based on my experience I'd probably say give this one a pass, unless you're particularly interested in the topic.
My Review: The most *annoying* book I've read this year. It's a novel that's so well-researched that it has twenty-five pages of notes at the end. It is, therefore, non-fiction. But that's not how the author wrote it! Oh nay nay nay! We are treated to forensic expeditions into the imagined emotional worlds of several dramatis personae (a term used advisedly here), backed up by those squillion pages of notes I mentioned, but still...in the 19th century, narrative non-fiction did a lot of this, and it's gone out of fashion for a reason: YOU DON'T KNOW THAT. You *think* it, and probably you're right, but you don't KNOW IT.
*thpfffbbbt*
I didn't enjoy this book. Had it been the novel it wanted to be, I would have, and quite a lot. The author has the chops. Had it been a real biography, or a *modern* narrative non-fiction, I would have, because the story is, frankly, riveting. But this thing that's not a good one of any of those things is simply not worth your time to read. The three stars are for the excellent story being told, and the peek into science a hundred years ago...fascinating things, both.
Akeley's life story is an interesting one (even if I do find his vocation a little creepy and am in general inclined to root for the animal over the hunter), and he lived in undeniably interesting times. Despite which I found this book a little hard to get into, largely due to the writing style. Much of it is written more like a novel than a biography, with descriptions of details, thoughts and emotions that, assuming the author isn't a mind-reading time traveler, are inevitably speculative and embellished. Whether or not this sort of thing works for a reader may be largely a matter of taste, but I do think there are some ways in which it's objectively problematic. For one thing, it blurs the boundary between fact and fiction just enough to make it unclear how much any of it can be trusted. The author does discuss where he gets his assumptions about his subjects' emotional states from and the extent to which various passages are or aren't supported by evidence in the endnotes, but I didn't find that a particularly satisfying solution to the problem. And this approach also makes for some awkwardness in the writing any time the author wants to take a step back from the personal accounts to put things in a broader context, as well as in the places where information about specific events simply isn't available. All of which might be forgivable if it made for a truly compelling read, but the writing in the more novelistic sections is often kind of overdone, full of emotional outbursts, exclamation points, and slightly overwrought turns of phrase, as if he didn't quite trust the subject matter to be exciting enough in itself. Which, honestly, it could have been.
I will add that there is one respect in which this choice of writing style does work very nicely, which is that it lets the more disturbing attitudes of the times -- colonialism, racism, a deeply conflicted and often destructive approach to nature -- speak for themselves. Very effectively so, in fact, with no excuses offered and no 21st century moralizing necessary. But, even so, I would have much preferred a more traditional non-fiction approach. As it is, I did find it worth reading, but just not as engaging as it should have been.
Author Jay Kirk’s approach in Kingdom Under Glass is not that of traditional biographer, but rather borders on historical fiction. Kirk argues that his research brings validity to his method. In his words: “Even though I employed some techniques that are traditionally novelistic, such as describing an individual’s thoughts and feelings or re-creating a conversation as I think it may have occurred, in reading the notes below the reader will find that any such narrative liberties are based on actual documentation.”
While this style makes for a vivid story, it consistently left me uneasy. How much of what I was reading was a reflection of Akeley’s experience and his time, and how much was Kirk’s modern-day interpretive imaginings? Dialogue constructed word for word from actual letters blurs with dialogue imagined by Kirk. And when Kirk felt elements of Akeley’s story would have bogged down the narrative, he simply left them out. To quote the author again: “Surely the most heinous crime of omission in my book concerns Carl’s 1921 expedition to the Congo. The omitted being his companions, the illustrious Herbert and Mary Hastings Bradley and their angelic six-year-old daughter, Alice [...] The problem here is, narratively, once he actually gets to the Virungas, he has second thoughts, wimps out, and leaves them behind [...] I realized it was all for the best to leave the Bradleys on the cutting room floor.” Was there nothing interesting about why Akeley “wimped out”? If an element of a biographical subject’s life isn’t sensational, is it really better left on the cutting room floor?
I also found glaring modernisms in the internal musings constructed by Kirk. At one point Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of American Museum of Natural History and Akeley’s boss, wonders to himself what killed the dinosaurs. “Had it been an asteroid? A nasty virus?” That’s an anachronistic gaffe -- those two theories weren’t raised until decades after Osborn’s death. Having read a great deal about paleontology I was able to catch that error, but it made me wonder how many other errors I wasn’t able to detect.
I can’t deny narrative non-fiction makes for a sensational (in both senses of the word) story. But I prefer my biographies straight up with no mixers. Instead of spending time on Kingdom Under Glass, I wish I’d either read Akeley’s own book, In Brightest Africa or the more traditional biography, African Obsession: The Life and Legacy of Carl Akeley by Penelope Bodry-Sanders.
I don't need to repeat the plot here, though be advised this is not for the faint of heart or any PETA advocate. (A few spots in here left me cringing, and I'm no animal rights
My only complaint, and I see it's shared by others, has to do with the many assumptions the writer makes about what people are thinking and feeling. I appreciate his resources, but these hardly account for everything. "Really? Was she really thinking this?" I wondered when Kirk would write what Carl's plucky wife, Mickie, was "feeling" along the journey. Or "Was that really what Carl thought?" when Kirk wrote of what was going on in Carl's mind while he filled the bodies of dead animals. It does serve to move the story along, making it almost movie-like, but it left me concerned that this wasn't so much a biography as a historical novel.
I also would have appreciated just a bit more of information about Carl outside of his taxidermy life. Some was there, but I would have welcomed another chapter on his childhood, and perhaps a bit less about his jungle life.
I would recommend this book to just about anyone, though keep in mind you're likely to pause, too, at the author's certainty as to what the main characters were thinking and feeling - and don't read this while eating.
I couldn't help thinking wtih both horror, repulsion, and fascination as I read this book: What a life? What a time to live in? There's a fine line between great adventure and exploitation in these pages as Mr. Kirk closely examines the larger than life figures, men and women, that surrounded Carl Akeley in The KIngdom Under Glass. The fact that as a child I innocently benefited and was mesmerized by these hunted animals in the dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History without knowing how they were created or by whom, was only an added fascination.
Kingdom Under Glass examines the life and career of celebrated taxidermist Carl Akeley. The book traced his training at a school for taxidermy, where Akeley began to develop his new methods for improving the lifelike quality of his stuffed subjects. Among his many accomplishments were the first museum diorama of a natural habitat at the Milwaukee Public Museum, an exhibit at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, aiding in the preservation of P.T. Barnum’s famous elephant Jumbo, and the aforementioned Hall of Mammals (which bears his name to this day). Even more amazing was that he was an inventor, responsible for a fast acting concrete that can be delivered through a “concrete gun” and a new revolutionary film camera and he was a writer of children’s stories as well. Also, ironically for a man that led several major hunting expeditions into Africa, he was the main proponent behind the chartering of the Virunga National Park (formally the Albert National Park) in Africa.
Jay Kirk does a wonderful job telling this remarkable man’s story: the experimentation he went through as he refined his trade, his turbulent relationship with his feisty wife, and the troubles he went through to build his dream exhibit in the New York Museum. Kirk uses a narrative style, often extrapolating private thoughts and conversations from available documentation. In this way, this book reminded me a good deal of David Grann’s Lost City of Z, which reads less like a historical biography and more like a novel. While this may affect some of the historical accuracy of the book, it certainly spices up the reading experience and allows the reader to dive deeper into the life of the taxidermist explorer.
Overall, if you have an interest in natural history or even just the events around the turn of the 20th century, this is an excellent book. I guarantee that after reading it, your next visit to the American Museum of Natural History will carry a different meaning.
The author uses many resources to deduce what most likely transpired on Akeley's journeys and gives the reader a fresh look into the story. You can almost feel as if you're traveling
Looked at today as the father of modern taxidermy and display design, Akeley was a complex man, not without significant warts, that make him all the more intriguing. His pioneering work on Jumbo the elephant, of P.T. Barnum fame, along with development of the painstakingly accurate natural displays to house the specimens he collected. allow us to look at a time when killing of wild animals to put them on display in museums in glass walled dioramas to allow the common man to experience their majesty was acceptable scientific practice.
But that's not all. Later in his life he was instrumental in the establishment of a nature preserve in the Congo to preserve the mountain gorillas and became an advocate to preserve nature in the wild and not in museums.
He also invented a movie camera that that was better than those of George Eastman (of Eastman-Kodak fame) allowing the capture on film of the natural worlds wonders.
A man of many talents Carl Akeley's life and adventures offer insights into nature preservation and turn of the century America.
Also, FINALLY finished it. Started it last summer but had to return it to the library, school library didn't have a copy, and finally found one here in Boise during my midsummer class. Huzzah for taking one off my currently reading shelf~
Carl Akeley (1864-1926) was a famous taxidermist, most notable for setting up dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. He spent much time in Africa with this two successive wives, on hunting safaris, looking for the perfect specimens for scientific posterity.
I had a bit of a