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.

My Museum Booklist

I've recently finished Jay Kirk's Kingdom Under Glass (review to follow soon), and it's made me want to read up more on the history of history museums.  Here's the book list I'm working on right now--recommendations would be lovely!

Still Life:Adventures in Taxidermy by Melissa Milgrom.

   -Inspired directly by Kirk's book, I'm eager to learn more about the art that featured so prominently in America's first museums.

The Species Seekers: heroes, fools, and the mad pursuit of life on earth by Richard Conniff

   -A gentleman I knew at the Field Museum had a species of bird named after him not too long ago, the Laniarius willardi, and this selection is in honor of him.  I love the idea of these people who purposely seek out the unknown; they're the engine behind museum research and also a little bit crazy--sounds like the perfect combo to me!

The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon

  -I really enjoy Nina's Museum 2.0 blog (though I have to limit my reading of it in order to keep this space from being a complete carbon copy of her), and I'm excited to read her thoughts in a more extended form.

Dry Storeroom #1: the secret life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey

 -I tend to gravitate towards novelistic histories, and this seems to fit the bill as an engaging history of museums. 

What are you reading about Museums?  I'd love some suggestions to expand my reading list!

Selling History

AP Photo/Mike Groll, File

I know there are a lot of museum folk out there who would take issue with that title--for many museums aim to share history and not to sell it.  But even if you're not focused on earning money, a museum still has to sell the idea of its collections to potential visitors.  With that in mind, here is today's suggested reading.  Class will reconvene on Wednesday for discussion.

A present for your weekend

Go here, and then follow every darn one of them (especially @SUEtheTrex, I have to show some hometown pride).  Then go here: #MuseumMascot and here: #tweetmuseumexhibs.  

You're welcome.

filler

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a museum since reading about the Chernobyl Museum.  More to come on that later, but I haven't been able to shape my thoughts into something coherent yet.  In the meantime, this:

 

The miniature worlds of old-school museum dioramas fascinate me.  The care and detail that go into these tiny worlds is astounding, and I kind of secretly wished that I was a small as the Indian in the Cupboard so I could explore them more fully.  So when my fancy-pants camera finally arrived in the mail, the old Native American hall with its amazing dioramas was the first place I went with it.  In the interest of full disclosure, there were a lot of crappy shots before I got these, and these are much more luck than skill...but I'm still really happy with them.

is it still a museum if no one sees the exhibits?

Last week I read Svetlana Alexievich's heartrending book, Voices from Chernobyl: the oral history of a nuclear disaster.  Alexievich is a journalist who interviewed people involved in Chernobyl--villagers, politicians, physicists, soldiers--for three years, and turned those interviews into the monologues that make up this astonishing book.  It's something everyone should read., and it details how little most people in Belarus knew about the dangers of radiation, and how little the government did to inform them.

One of the things that struck me most was an interview with Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev, who discussed how the Soviet mindset contributed to the deception because they lied to themselves as much as the government lied to them.  In 1996, when the interview was recorded, Sobolev was gathering artifacts for a Chernobyl Museum.  It doesn't seem to be the official museum in Kiev, as he references an artifact there as being different than what he has, and I can't track much else down about either his Chernobyl Museum or Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev himself.  But here's what he said that struck me the most:

"Now do you understand how I see our museum?  In that urn there is some land from Chernobyl. A handful.  And there's a miner's helmet.  Also from there.  Some farmer's equipment from the Zone.  We can't let dosimeters in here--we're glowing!  But everything here needs to be real.  No plaster casts.  People need to believe us.  And they'll only believe the real thing, because there are too many lies around Chernobyl.  There were and there are still."  (Alexievich 138)

Excerpted here it doesn't carry the weight it does as a part of the whole text, but I find myself both sympathetic and torn.  Learning how many people sacrificed their lives (and their health, and the health of their children and loved ones) without realizing what they were doing I understand the deep need for authenticity.  But that same authenticity almost certainly assure that your museum can only be visited by people who either still don't believe the radiation is dangerous or who are already so affected by it that wandering around rooms full of highly radioactive artifacts won't do them any more harm.

And this all gets to a deeper question, one that's not so far away from the old puzzler, 'If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?'  Is it enough for a museum to preserve history even if no one visits it?  Is a museum the collection of artifacts, or the collective experience of seeing the artifacts and learning the history?  The museum Sobolev describes certainly has an authenticity that the official museum in Kiev seems to lack, but if that authenticity comes at the cost of outsiders being able to begin to understand the experience, is it worth it?  Perhaps just knowing such a place exists is enough, perhaps that knowledge automatically balances what may be a less "real" exhibit, but it's hard to say.

Regardless of this existential puzzle, you should go read Voices from Chernobyl immediately.