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A Gathering of Wonders: Behind the Scenes at the American Museum of *Natural* History
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,
* 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 : "Woman 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. 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.
* 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 : "Woman 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. 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.
- GenresHistory
304 pages, Paperback
First published June 10, 2000
33 people want to read
About the author
Joseph Wallace
13 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
Other authors writing under this name are:
Joseph Wallace
Joseph Wallace (1834-1904)
Joseph Wallace, poultry
Other authors writing under this name are:
Joseph Wallace
Joseph Wallace (1834-1904)
Joseph Wallace, poultry
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 26, 2013
The problem with an natural history museum like the American Museum of Natural History is one of scale. You buy your ticket (which is not cheap) and then you face halls and halls and halls of amazing, cool, historic, and one-of-a-kind artifacts. For the first few, you are properly amazed, marveling at the history around, fitting new pieces of information together in unexpected ways in your head.
The problem is that it's too much. There's no way to take it all in. Your poor human senses and brain are overwhelmed. You'd need six months, at least, to get a sense of the scope of everything and to be properly awed. But you have one afternoon. And, because you bought your ticket and hold museums in such high esteem, you force yourself through halls and exhibits long after the point that your brain has checked out. Your brain becomes the bored six year old you once were. Oh, look, another massively old, immensely historic, unique bit of human history. Another masterpiece. Yet another stunning jewel. Another piece of rock that has seen more millions of years than I can even imagine. Yet another ancient skull from somewhere in the human lineage. It begins to all just wash over you until you flee, in a cloud of guilt and exhaustion, feeling that you really didn't get the most out of your museum experience.
That's the problem this book faces and, to some degree, the problem it sets out to solve. Writing a full, comprehensive history of a museum is a mammoth task. That's why it's so rarely been done. There's just too much raw material, too many jaw-dropping stories, too much there there.
That being said, A Gathering of Wonders does an excellent job, within its scope. It's a wonderful romp through the halls of AMNH and a cherry picking of its most famous stories and personalities. The book is engrossing. It makes you want to move to the museum, and study one new object every day, learn one new discipline a month.
It's a wonderful tasting: you get a little bit of everything and not too much of any one thing. It's perfect for rambling reading. I highly recommend this book.
The problem is that it's too much. There's no way to take it all in. Your poor human senses and brain are overwhelmed. You'd need six months, at least, to get a sense of the scope of everything and to be properly awed. But you have one afternoon. And, because you bought your ticket and hold museums in such high esteem, you force yourself through halls and exhibits long after the point that your brain has checked out. Your brain becomes the bored six year old you once were. Oh, look, another massively old, immensely historic, unique bit of human history. Another masterpiece. Yet another stunning jewel. Another piece of rock that has seen more millions of years than I can even imagine. Yet another ancient skull from somewhere in the human lineage. It begins to all just wash over you until you flee, in a cloud of guilt and exhaustion, feeling that you really didn't get the most out of your museum experience.
That's the problem this book faces and, to some degree, the problem it sets out to solve. Writing a full, comprehensive history of a museum is a mammoth task. That's why it's so rarely been done. There's just too much raw material, too many jaw-dropping stories, too much there there.
That being said, A Gathering of Wonders does an excellent job, within its scope. It's a wonderful romp through the halls of AMNH and a cherry picking of its most famous stories and personalities. The book is engrossing. It makes you want to move to the museum, and study one new object every day, learn one new discipline a month.
It's a wonderful tasting: you get a little bit of everything and not too much of any one thing. It's perfect for rambling reading. I highly recommend this book.
March 1, 2015
also posted to fredscience.tumblr.com
A Gathering of Wonders is a not half bad substitute for those of us who can't actually make the trip out to the AMNH in New York. It's a brisk, whirlwind survey of various research projects since the museum's founding. It's not what I was hoping for, which would be a comprehensive history of how the museum and its various projects and collections came to be (something I glimpsed in The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science). I admit that would've been hard to keep under 300 pages. But this book is superficial and unfocused. It's more a series of essays, vignettes even, than a book. It flits from topic to topic without any obvious organizing principle. Sure, they're organized into chapters with a rough theme, but there's never so much as an introductory paragraph establishing the topic. It's left to the reader to go, "Guess...this is the vertebrate paleontology bit?"
In that sense, it's almost like visiting a museum and trying to visit every exhibit in a day--you drift from exhibit to exhibit, not taking anything in except in a very cursory fashion. Given it's a book about a museum, readers may appreciate this sort of structure. Personally, I felt I was reading a book and it ought to act like one.
It does touch on (and I do mean touch on) some very interesting subjects and people. Carl Akely, Margaret Mead, some of the lesser-known minds behind the Museum including many overlooked female scientists and anthropologists. I managed to read almost all of it out of interest despite being fed up with the organization and the marks made by the book's previous owner. So I won't /not/ recommend it. YMMV. 2.5/5 stars.
A Gathering of Wonders is a not half bad substitute for those of us who can't actually make the trip out to the AMNH in New York. It's a brisk, whirlwind survey of various research projects since the museum's founding. It's not what I was hoping for, which would be a comprehensive history of how the museum and its various projects and collections came to be (something I glimpsed in The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science). I admit that would've been hard to keep under 300 pages. But this book is superficial and unfocused. It's more a series of essays, vignettes even, than a book. It flits from topic to topic without any obvious organizing principle. Sure, they're organized into chapters with a rough theme, but there's never so much as an introductory paragraph establishing the topic. It's left to the reader to go, "Guess...this is the vertebrate paleontology bit?"
In that sense, it's almost like visiting a museum and trying to visit every exhibit in a day--you drift from exhibit to exhibit, not taking anything in except in a very cursory fashion. Given it's a book about a museum, readers may appreciate this sort of structure. Personally, I felt I was reading a book and it ought to act like one.
It does touch on (and I do mean touch on) some very interesting subjects and people. Carl Akely, Margaret Mead, some of the lesser-known minds behind the Museum including many overlooked female scientists and anthropologists. I managed to read almost all of it out of interest despite being fed up with the organization and the marks made by the book's previous owner. So I won't /not/ recommend it. YMMV. 2.5/5 stars.
May 11, 2014
I love museums, I work at a museum, I love learning about the secrets behind museums. That's what I expected to learn from this book; the secrets and controversies behind the AMNH, with a title like, "Behind the Scenes." Instead, this book was more about the research that has been done at the museum. I was not looking to read research papers when I picked up this book. There was the odd behind the scene story such as the blue whale exhibit, but for the most part it is an accumulation of research summaries.
May 20, 2017
There are very enjoyable stories sprinkled through out this book...just not enough of them. The author relies on research reports in the Museum's library for most of the anecdotes and background on curators and exhibits.
There was little "Behind the scenes..." in the sense of how the museum operates.
There was little "Behind the scenes..." in the sense of how the museum operates.
August 11, 2013
A gathering of vignettes at the AMNH, more like (reminded me of a Tigra scientifica compilation), with chapters providing a loose theme for a series of research, expeditions, and stories about the collections. As a look over a broad number of categories, it does its job well- I enjoyed it, and have a better idea of what I'd want to look at if/when I ever go to NYC (I mean, I already did because of Carl Akeley but COME ON who doesn't love Carl Akeley)
October 16, 2017
An interesting, if anecdotal, look at the Museum of Natural History and the people who formed it and shaped it. There's no sense of coherent narrative so don't go in expecting one. Instead, Wallace shares stories about the people who worked there.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews