Book Review: Jay Kirk's Kingdom Under Glass

I finished this book a few weeks ago, and keep forgetting to write it up.  On a scale of 1 to 5, I would give Kingdom Under Glass a 3.5.  

Photo borrowed from Mike Ansel from his blog "Hunting with Mike".  It was way too good to resist!

 

It was an engaging read, but it was a touch too novelistic for my tastes.  Kirk understands this flaw, and goes to some lengths in his afterward to describe how he came to the conclusions he did regarding Carl and Delia Akeley's thought processes and motivations.  He makes some valid points, but I simply don't agree that a book that presumes to know what a little girl on a street car in the early 1900s thought about Carl Akeley's arms should be classified as non-fiction.  

Now, on the flip side, this very engaging style of writing made the book much more readable than a traditional biography, and I tore through it.  I deeply appreciated that Kirk told the story of the Akeley's from both Carl and Delia's perspectives, especially when it would have been so easy to dismiss Delia as paranoid or unstable.  Again, I think Kirk got a little too far into what he thought these long-dead taxidermists were thinking, but it was a wise choice to split the focus of the book between them both.

My only other issue with Kingdom Under Glass is that I wanted more of it to be about the dioramas and museum work they they both did so well.  A large portion of the latter half of Kirk's book is extensive descriptions of the African safaris on which the Akeleys collected their specimens, which is fascinating, but not what I had hoped for.  On the other hand, the focus on the safari and the hunting of great African mammals just as conservation of species and habitat was beginning to become a concern is a nice echo of current worries and sentiments, and a good reminder to modern readers.  I suppose I can't really fault the book for not being exactly what I wanted, since it was so good at being what it was: a highly stylized and novelistic, but incredibly readable biography of two fascinating people who lived during a fascinating time.

In the end, I would definitely recommend that museum lovers read this book--but save your money and check it out from the library.