Review: The Feather Thief (Kirk Wallace Johnson) This book was chosen for next week's Music Hall Book Group. Although I had never heard of it, what a great choice it turned out to be! I was totally drawn in to all the various threads of this non-fiction book, subtitled "Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century". The heist refers to an event in 2009 in England when a young gifted flutist studying at the Royal Academy of Music leaves after a performance, takes a train to the countryside where the Trist Museum is located, and manages to break in and steal almost 300 exotic bird skins, irreplaceable for the most part, as they are all protected or extinct species. Kirk Wallace Johnson uses this story to subtly tell us his own, and that is one of the surprises in the book, which I won't spoil. Meanwhile, the book is organized deftly. We are taken back in time to learn the life story of a Darwin contemporary named Alfred Russel Wallace who independently and simultaneously came up with the theory of natural selection as he spend many years both in the Amazon basin and later in the Malay peninsula. It is during his years in the latter that he created the collection of rare birds which Edwin Rist stole. After this we learn of the destructive obsession of the Victorian fashion industry with exotic bird feathers, a craze that eventually ended due to the efforts of women rejecting the massive slaughter of birds. But there was another obsessed feather world out there that has never given up, that of the salmon fly-tyers, a world the author examined extensively. This is definitely a mystery book of sorts and was recognized as such by making it into the final round of Edgar Awards for true crime. I feel enlightened, somewhat disheartened by the big questions the book raises, but ultimately very satisfied with this engrossing book.

on the bench near the entrance