(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)
Hardcover, 285 Pages, Nonfiction
ABCD Rating: BACKLIST
“My hobby is stuffing things—you know, taxidermy.” —Norman Bates, Psycho
From the Cover: It’s easy to dismiss taxidermy as a kitschy or morbid sideline, the realm of trophy fish and jackalopes or an anachronistic throwback to the dusty diorama. Yet it is a thriving world full of intrepid hunter-explorers, eccentric naturalists, and gifted museum artisans, all devoted to the paradoxical pursuit of creating the illusion of life. Into this subculture ventures journalist Melissa Milgrom, whose quest to understand its fascination takes her from the family workshop to the last chief taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History to the studio where an English sculptor preserves animals for Damien Hirst’s most disturbing artworks. Milgrom wanders through Mr. Potter’s Museum of Curiosities to watch dealers vie for bespectacled lobsters and other preserved Victorian oddities, and visits the Smithsonian’s offsite lab where taxidermists transform zoo skins into vivacious beasts. She tags along with a Canadian bear hunter—the three-time World Taxidermy Champion—as he re-creates an extinct Irish elk using DNA studies and Paleolithic cave art as references. She even picks up a scalpel herself. Transformed from a curious onlooker to an empathetic participant, Milgrom comes to understand not only what drives the very best taxidermists in their desire for perfection, but why people in our era of ecological awareness and high technology still find taxidermy so alluring. Straddling science and art, high culture and kitsch—like taxidermy itself—Still Life celebrates the beauty in the uncanny.
My Review: I need to get this off of my chest before I go any further in this review: I get that people are put off by taxidermy. I think it rather fascinating and beautiful, but after reading Milgrom’s book, I think I understand why people are so put off, because there is taxidermy and then there is taxidermy. There is the American Museum of Natural History, and then there is Norman Bates, so I get that people are turned off by the idea. I think, though that Milgrom’s book will go a long way to understanding not only taxidermy, but taxidermists because professional taxidermists are not Jeffrey Dahmers and Norman Bateses … they are in fact dedicated scientists and biologists and conservationists.
Now, with that out of the way, let’s get to Still Life. I first heard about this book three maybe four weeks ago. I was sitting in my office on campus waiting for my 101 students not to show up and I was flipping through the Art section of The New York Times and there was a review of this book. I took it home, showed my wife and said, “Doesn’t this sound like my kind of book?” She agreed immediately, because she knows that one of my literary guilty pleasures is what I like to call Weird Nonfiction. (Of course, this is a nod to the old genre of Weird Fiction.) I mean by this the nonfiction books that explore offbeat topics like what happens to cadavers, the art of the obituary, the history-altering power of the banana, the world of competitive pumpkin growing, the lives sanguivores, and the history of collective nouns. I love learning, and what better way to learn than to read about a topic that you didn’t even know existed (let alone had an entire book dedicated to it)?
So, taxidermy. What I found so fascinating about Milgrom is her willingness to immerse herself in her topic, from doing extensive research with some of the best taxidermists in the world to attending the World Taxidermy Championships to finally skinning, fleshing and mounting her own squirrel (which she then entered in the WTC). That is, in my book, above and beyond the call of duty and goes a long way to making the book (and its author) more sympathetic and interesting.
There is a lot of fun and interesting stuff going on in this book though. In particular, the history of taxidermy was absolutely fascinating from Carl Akeley, William Hornaday, to the Peale Museum and the Potter Museum (a collection of Victorian taxidermy which is, to say the least, simply odd). However, the part of the book that was most interesting to me was when Milgrom started talking about the Re-Creations’ category from the WTC. Re-Creations according to the WTC rule book “are defined as renderings which include no natural parts of the animal portrayed … For instance, a re-creation eagle could be constructed using eagle feathers, or a cow hide could be used to simulate African game” (Milgrom 34). So, a re-creation would be—as described in the book—a red-tailed hawk made from a turkey, chicken and goose however, the most impressive re-creations have to be Ken Walker’s (a professional taxidermist from Alberta and a consultant for the Smithsonian). He re-created a panda (aptly named Thing-Thing) from two black bears (check it out HERE and HERE … can you tell that that’s not two black bears) and won Best in World Re-Creation with it, and then made an extinct Irish Elk (which is not an elk but a kind of deer when it gets to genetics) from three different elk (again, check it out HERE and you tell me that that wasn’t a real animal at one time … and for a sense of scale, that’s a thirteen-foot rack of antlers on that thing).
Now, as I said at the beginning, I know that taxidermy is not everyone’s thing … and that come people find it bordering on the creepy. However, if you can come to the topic with an open mind, then Still Life is a book you might want to consider. You never know, it may just change your mind on the topic.
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