A Gathering of Wonders
Behind the Scenes at The American Museum of Natural History
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Since it was founded in 1869, the American Museum of Natural History has stood as one of the world's greatest repositories of scientific information and investigation. This delightful book takes us behind the exhibits and shows us some of the great researchers and fabulous objects from the Museum's past and present, ranging through every department and focusing on fabulous tales and fascinating objects, both small and large, including:
* the famous Oviraptor eggs unearthed in the Gobi desert.
* the stunning new Hall of Biodiversity, whose trees hold 411,000 model leaves
* the 563-carat Star of India sapphire and the 632-carat Patricia emerald
* Katharine Burden's hunt for the Komodo dragon : "Women Huntress Revolts Against Playing Safe---Kills Huge 'Malay Dragon' "
* the epic saga of the huge blue whale model
This book offers a backstage tour through the halls and history of the Museum, venturing into ornithology, invertebrates, zoology, entomology, herpetology, and other disciplines, celebrating the treasures and the scientists responsible for bringing them to the light of day. Museum-goers will find their enjoyment enhanced by the wonderful anecdotes and insights, and armchair travelers will find the back-scenes tour enriching and enlightening.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Generations of New Yorkers and visitors have marveled at the American Museum of Natural History's best-known sights: a life-size blue whale, bolted to a ceiling as if airborne; a 75-times-bigger-than-life-size mosquito; gemstones gleaming like science's own crown jewels; rock slabs from volcanoes and meteorites; and most recently, a gee-whiz, digital-age planetarium. Science writer Wallace (The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaur) describes the AMNH through its most famous, colorful or important scientists and administrators, from the 1880s to the 1970s. Carl Akeley (1864-1926), taxidermist, sculptor and early crusader for Africa's endangered mammals, showed the American public that mountain gorillas weren't vicious, then fought to save the gorillas' Congo habitat. Richard van Gelder planned and designed the famous whale. (At one point the museum planned instead to show a "dead" and "beached" whale on the floor.) Hardworking, reserved Mary Cynthia Dickerson (1866-1923), "a shining example of the self-made naturalist," founded the museum's department of herpetology (reptiles). Among more recent eminences who've worked for the museum, Wallace covers Ernst Mayr (an expert on birds and on evolution) and paleontologist Niles Eldredge (of "punctuated equilibrium" fame; see review of his The Triumph of Evolution, above). Not a scholarly work, Wallace's account, which has a crazy-quilt feel with many small entries on this and that, is almost entirely admiring, with never an expos and rarely a caveat. Dedicated AMNH fans might enjoy this neat tribute to researchers and educators, but even they will be better served by Douglas Preston's superb history of the museum, Dinosaurs in the Attic (1983).
