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    Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals
    Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals
    Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals
    Ebook560 pages8 hours

    Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals

    By Jay Kirk

    4/5

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    A sweeping historical narrative of the life of Carl Akeley, the famed explorer and taxidermist who changed the way Americans viewed the conservation of the natural world

    During the golden age of safaris in the early twentieth century, one man set out to preserve Africa's great beasts. In this epic account of an extraordinary life lived during remarkable times, Jay Kirk follows the adventures of the brooding genius who revolutionized taxidermy and created the famed African Hall we visit today at New York's Museum of Natural History. The Gilded Age was drawing to a close, and with it came the realization that men may have hunted certain species into oblivion. Renowned taxidermist Carl Akeley joined the hunters rushing to Africa, where he risked death time and again as he stalked animals for his dioramas and hobnobbed with outsized personalities of the era such as Theodore Roosevelt and P. T. Barnum. In a tale of art, science, courage, and romance, Jay Kirk resurrects a legend and illuminates a fateful turning point when Americans had to decide whether to save nature, to destroy it, or to just stare at it under glass.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 26, 2010
    ISBN9781429989169
    Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals
    Author

    Jay Kirk

    JAY KIRK is the author of Kingdom Under Glass, named one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2010 by the Washington Post. His award-winning nonfiction has been published in Harper’s, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, and anthologized in Best American Crime Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper’s Magazine. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and was a finalist for the 2013 National Magazine Award. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded XFic.org, a journal of experimental nonfiction.

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    Reviews for Kingdom Under Glass

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    • 5/5
      The story of Carl Akeley as he improves the world of taxidermy and goes to Africa to preserve the big game animals that are being hunted out of existence. He also developed a camera to take live action film of the animals as they move. His was an interesting world. The details are fascinating as Mr. Kirk tells Carl's story. I even read the notes. His documentation of his sources is good. I want to read some of them, if they are still available. I loved Micki, stubborn as she could be, but that is what gave her the strength and courage to do what she did for Carl. I did not like his second wife as well. Carl had a lot of stamina and perseverance as he went for the animals he wanted in his dioramas surviving a leopard and elephant attack. He should die much earlier than he did. He was involved with famous people from that era--Theodore Roosevelt and George Eastman of Kodak. Interesting story. Reads like a novel.
    • 3/5
      Taxidermy, especially at the museum level fascinates me as a merger of science and art. Carl Akeley is considered to be the father of modern taxidermy, and this book follows his life from boyhood to dying on his last trip to Africa. Jay Kirk takes some liberties depicting scenes using words people said from various memoirs or letters, but I appreciated it as it kept an interesting narrative for a fascinating man. Also included: Teddy Roosevelt, attitudes about conservation and evolution from the turn of the century, and shooting things in the name of science.

      Also, FINALLY finished it. Started it last summer but had to return it to the library, school library didn't have a copy, and finally found one here in Boise during my midsummer class. Huzzah for taking one off my currently reading shelf~
    • 4/5
      3.5 starsCarl Akeley (1864-1926) was a famous taxidermist, most notable for setting up dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. He spent much time in Africa with this two successive wives, on hunting safaris, looking for the perfect specimens for scientific posterity. I had a bit of a hard time with this. It’s an interesting story and he had an interesting life (he also invented a few things, one of them highlighted in the book being a video camera to take nature videos), but I had a really hard time with the hunting – in my mind, it was just glorified trophy hunting. So wasteful – he would kill animals, but not even use them because they were not exactly what he was looking for for his imagined displays for the museum. He later did help start a sanctuary for gorillas, but only after he’d killed the ones he wanted, and he continued to kill other animals after. It did read like fiction, but the author has notes at the end to explain where he got much of his information and where he “expanded” and how he came to decide on telling it that way.
    • 4/5
      This biography of Carl Akeley, a taxidermist who was primarily responsible for the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History, tells a tale of his obsession with displaying the fauna of Africa behind glass before it becomes extinct. This, of course, necessitates the killing of the animals he claims to glorify. He leads several expeditions to Africa, where he kills many more animals than he needs, searching for the perfect specimens for his dioramas. He ruins his health in the process and has two marriages to fascinating women. The style of this book is very novelistic. The author acknowledges that this method of telling his story leads to doubt about the accuracy of his work. He includes extensive notes on the provenance of each chapter to allay those doubts. This is a compelling tale of a particular man, but also of the time when rich men and a few women went to Africa and wantonly devastated the animals there. (After his presidency, Teddy Roosevelt went on a safari to Africa where he killed more than 11,000 animals.) At least Akeley had a goal beyond the simple joy of killing. I must admit that I never stopped to think about the animals that were killed to provide the museum displays that I have always enjoyed.
    • 2/5
      I see that this book has received some very positive reviews. It cannot be denied that this book is fun and exciting to read. But I am troubled by the author's approach, which takes some liberty getting into the minds of the individuals and vividly painting scenes that may not have existed as he portrayed them.
    • 5/5
      An amazing read. Well researched and annotated, this book brings to our attention the life and career of Carl Akeley.The author uses many resources to deduce what most likely transpired on Akeley's journeys and gives the reader a fresh look into the story. You can almost feel as if you're traveling along in search of elephants, mountain gorillas and experiencing it all yourself. Looked at today as the father of modern taxidermy and display design, Akeley was a complex man, not without significant warts, that make him all the more intriguing. His pioneering work on Jumbo the elephant, of P.T. Barnum fame, along with development of the painstakingly accurate natural displays to house the specimens he collected. allow us to look at a time when killing of wild animals to put them on display in museums in glass walled dioramas to allow the common man to experience their majesty was acceptable scientific practice. But that's not all. Later in his life he was instrumental in the establishment of a nature preserve in the Congo to preserve the mountain gorillas and became an advocate to preserve nature in the wild and not in museums.He also invented a movie camera that that was better than those of George Eastman (of Eastman-Kodak fame) allowing the capture on film of the natural worlds wonders. A man of many talents Carl Akeley's life and adventures offer insights into nature preservation and turn of the century America.
    • 5/5
      "Kingdom Under Glass" by Jay Kirk is the rare book that struggles positively against categorization. Kirk's verbal thought experiment considers the fascinating life of taxidermist and explorer Carl Akeley at the turn of the 20th century. By using straight biography, historical treatise, and imagined dialogues, Jay Kirk's magnificent volume breathes fresh air into the dusty corridors of natural history. From the standpoint of the early 21st century, Kirk's "Kingdom Under Glass" could not be more timely. Akeley's slaughter of the rare creatures that he wished to save for eternity is horrifying and all too common. I highly recommend "Kingdom Under Glass".
    • 5/5
      For a book that was a lucky draw from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program, this was quite a fortuitous catch for me. Natural history has always been one of my interests, and to get the opportunity to read a biography about the man responsible for the African Hall of Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History was incredible.Kingdom Under Glass examines the life and career of celebrated taxidermist Carl Akeley. The book traced his training at a school for taxidermy, where Akeley began to develop his new methods for improving the lifelike quality of his stuffed subjects. Among his many accomplishments were the first museum diorama of a natural habitat at the Milwaukee Public Museum, an exhibit at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, aiding in the preservation of P.T. Barnum’s famous elephant Jumbo, and the aforementioned Hall of Mammals (which bears his name to this day). Even more amazing was that he was an inventor, responsible for a fast acting concrete that can be delivered through a “concrete gun” and a new revolutionary film camera and he was a writer of children’s stories as well. Also, ironically for a man that led several major hunting expeditions into Africa, he was the main proponent behind the chartering of the Virunga National Park (formally the Albert National Park) in Africa.Jay Kirk does a wonderful job telling this remarkable man’s story: the experimentation he went through as he refined his trade, his turbulent relationship with his feisty wife, and the troubles he went through to build his dream exhibit in the New York Museum. Kirk uses a narrative style, often extrapolating private thoughts and conversations from available documentation. In this way, this book reminded me a good deal of David Grann’s Lost City of Z, which reads less like a historical biography and more like a novel. While this may affect some of the historical accuracy of the book, it certainly spices up the reading experience and allows the reader to dive deeper into the life of the taxidermist explorer.Overall, if you have an interest in natural history or even just the events around the turn of the 20th century, this is an excellent book. I guarantee that after reading it, your next visit to the American Museum of Natural History will carry a different meaning.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this book, but I don't really think you can call it a 'true story'. The authors takes the liberty of filling in gaps with what he supposes might have occured; what he believes, based on his research, most likely was felt or said, etc. For me, when the author conveys the facts he has uncovered during his research and compiles it into a cohesive story that is when the book works best. However when he adds his own imaginings to the facts it completely undermines the research and moves this book into something akin to a movie that is 'inspired by true events'. This is really unfortunate because the author's writing is compelling and Carl Akeley's story is interesting without embellishment.
    • 3/5
      I would like to rate this book higher, as it's subject is a fascinating one, but I found the stylistic mish-mash of nonfiction and fiction too disconcerting. I didn't know whether to take the book seriously or treat it as a Haggard-esque adventure novel. How much of what I read was actual truth and how much was authorial fabrication? It was hard to tell, and it undermined the legitimacy of the author's voice.
    • 3/5
      The Book Report: The book's subtitle, "A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals", pretty much sums it up: Weirdo misfit Carl Akeley lives a wild-ass, totally rad life instead of the timid little existence his dominating, emasculating mother has planned for him; hunts all over the place, creates works of taxidermical art, in fact *invents* most of the modern practices of taxidermy, and steals someone else's wife a few times along the way.My Review: The most *annoying* book I've read this year. It's a novel that's so well-researched that it has twenty-five pages of notes at the end. It is, therefore, non-fiction. But that's not how the author wrote it! Oh nay nay nay! We are treated to forensic expeditions into the imagined emotional worlds of several dramatis personae (a term used advisedly here), backed up by those squillion pages of notes I mentioned, but still...in the 19th century, narrative non-fiction did a lot of this, and it's gone out of fashion for a reason: YOU DON'T KNOW THAT. You *think* it, and probably you're right, but you don't KNOW IT.*thpfffbbbt*I didn't enjoy this book. Had it been the novel it wanted to be, I would have, and quite a lot. The author has the chops. Had it been a real biography, or a *modern* narrative non-fiction, I would have, because the story is, frankly, riveting. But this thing that's not a good one of any of those things is simply not worth your time to read. The three stars are for the excellent story being told, and the peek into science a hundred years ago...fascinating things, both.
    • 4/5
      Jay Kirk has written a fascinating account of Carl Akeley, taxidermist extraordinaire, against a background of 19th century invention, innovation, and expansion. Part artist, adventurer, scientist, inventor, and big game hunter, Carl Akeley, rubbed shoulders with some of the greatest names of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He took an unusual interest in taxidermy while a young boy and as he later worked for names like PT Barnum, The American Museum of Natural HIstory, and Marshall Fields, he perfected his skill to the point of perfectionism. The idea of preserving animals that will likely become extinct for future generations through the means of taxidermy is one of the greatest ironies of the book, and one that Akeley was at the center of, as he himself hunted indiscriminately to find the perfect pelt for his visual dioramas. In his defense, he reflected the scientific thought typical of his time. The fact that he also had an epiphany of sorts that led to a wildlife preserve for the mountain gorilla in the Congo put Akeley ahead of his time.I couldn't help thinking wtih both horror, repulsion, and fascination as I read this book: What a life? What a time to live in? There's a fine line between great adventure and exploitation in these pages as Mr. Kirk closely examines the larger than life figures, men and women, that surrounded Carl Akeley in The KIngdom Under Glass. The fact that as a child I innocently benefited and was mesmerized by these hunted animals in the dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History without knowing how they were created or by whom, was only an added fascination.
    • 3/5
      Summary: Carl Akeley is the founder of modern taxidermy, and is responsible for the famous African Hall in the American Museum of Natural History. Akeley lived and worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when African hunting safaris were still popular, but the realization was growing that Africa's abundance was not limitless, and that man might very well be hunting most of the big game animals to the brink of extinction. Akeley and his wife Mickie were among those hunters, but Akeley's goal was not sport, but rather the preservation and reproduction of Nature in museum dioramas where they might serve as a snapshot and a record to instruct future generations. But where is the balance between preservation in a glass box and preservation of a living species, the balance between killing animals and saving them?Review: There is a way of writing narrative non-fiction, and in particular narrative history and biography, that works to balance fact and speculation and to bring the story and the subject to fore while letting the author's presence recede into the background. I've read multiple books that do this successfully - The Devil in the White City and The Lost City of Z, among others - and I've no doubt that it's the style Kirk was shooting for in Kingdom Under Glass. Unfortunately, he missed the mark: Kirk's style of narrative vacillates between reproducing conversations and even inner thoughts without so much as a qualifier, to presenting entire scenes where every verb is slapped with a "might have," and every inference or interpretation is defended almost belligerently in the endnotes. In general, his authorial voice comes through on every page, as though he didn't trust the story to be interesting enough on its own.Even forgiving the strange biographer's shenanigans, Kirk's prose style just didn't sit well with me. There were lots of strange sentence constructions and random fragments, and a tendency to inflate the writing with more two-dollar words (occasionally used slightly incorrectly) than were necessary. I got a sense that he had no problem playing fast and loose with the language and the facts if he thought his interpretation sounded better. For example, there's some nice alliteration in the phrase "while the mastodon's skeleton macerated in a brick tank the size of an aquarium...", but unfortunately what Kirk is actually talking about is an elephant, not a mastodon; a telling mistake in a book that's likely to be of interest to people who know something about zoology.But even forgiving the narrative style *and* the prose, I still had a hard time getting involved with the story. Akeley lead an interesting life, no doubt, but he's not a particularly likable or sympathetic subject for a biography. To me, a ten-year-old who spends his summers skinning squirrels in his bedroom does not say "misunderstood future genius" so much as "potential sociopath," and his thirty-year-old self's "romance" with a fifteen-year-old runaway who was more than a little mentally unbalanced herself read as equally creepy. Neither Carl nor his wife particularly grew on me as the story progressed - rather the opposite, in fact; Mickie got so obnoxious that I started to wish for a lion to eat her and put us all out of our misery - and my favorite parts were when the story focused more on the Akeley's associates and acquaintances.For all of that, however, I'm still not sorry I read this book. When I was a child, I loved natural history museums second only to zoos, and I did learn quite a bit about the origin and creation of the animal dioramas that always fascinated yet repulsed me. Also, Kirk paints a very good picture of the tail end of the Gilded Age and the gradual waning of the safari craze, and all of the accompanying attitudes and prejudices of the time, which is not a topic that I've read much about. (I do wish that there had been a little more time spent on the founding of the first gorilla preserve and the shift to conservationism that was hinted at in the title, however.) Overall, while I did learn something, and I appreciate the introduction to a person and a topic I might not otherwise have thought much about, I didn't care much for its packaging, and probably would have been better served reading one of Akeley's own books, or other contemporary memoirs. 2.5 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: While Kirk's style might work for others more than it did for me, based on my experience I'd probably say give this one a pass, unless you're particularly interested in the topic.
    • 3/5
      Kingdom Under Glass is an “historical narrative” of the life of Carl Akeley, the explorer and naturalist responsible for the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of African Mammals, who was (arguably) the world’s most brilliant taxidermist. Akeley’s life seems too astonishing to be true, a pulp action-thriller filled with hair-raising adventures in “Darkest Africa” – from killing a leopard with his bare hands to surviving an attack by a massive, enraged bull elephant.Author Jay Kirk’s approach in Kingdom Under Glass is not that of traditional biographer, but rather borders on historical fiction. Kirk argues that his research brings validity to his method. In his words: “Even though I employed some techniques that are traditionally novelistic, such as describing an individual’s thoughts and feelings or re-creating a conversation as I think it may have occurred, in reading the notes below the reader will find that any such narrative liberties are based on actual documentation.”While this style makes for a vivid story, it consistently left me uneasy. How much of what I was reading was a reflection of Akeley’s experience and his time, and how much was Kirk’s modern-day interpretive imaginings? Dialogue constructed word for word from actual letters blurs with dialogue imagined by Kirk. And when Kirk felt elements of Akeley’s story would have bogged down the narrative, he simply left them out. To quote the author again: “Surely the most heinous crime of omission in my book concerns Carl’s 1921 expedition to the Congo. The omitted being his companions, the illustrious Herbert and Mary Hastings Bradley and their angelic six-year-old daughter, Alice [...] The problem here is, narratively, once he actually gets to the Virungas, he has second thoughts, wimps out, and leaves them behind [...] I realized it was all for the best to leave the Bradleys on the cutting room floor.” Was there nothing interesting about why Akeley “wimped out”? If an element of a biographical subject’s life isn’t sensational, is it really better left on the cutting room floor?I also found glaring modernisms in the internal musings constructed by Kirk. At one point Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of American Museum of Natural History and Akeley’s boss, wonders to himself what killed the dinosaurs. “Had it been an asteroid? A nasty virus?” That’s an anachronistic gaffe -- those two theories weren’t raised until decades after Osborn’s death. Having read a great deal about paleontology I was able to catch that error, but it made me wonder how many other errors I wasn’t able to detect.I can’t deny narrative non-fiction makes for a sensational (in both senses of the word) story. But I prefer my biographies straight up with no mixers. Instead of spending time on Kingdom Under Glass, I wish I’d either read Akeley’s own book, In Brightest Africa or the more traditional biography, African Obsession: The Life and Legacy of Carl Akeley by Penelope Bodry-Sanders.
    • 4/5
      "Kingdom Under Glass" is a wonderful marriage of an extraordinary story with a very good writer; I loved reading it. I don't need to repeat the plot here, though be advised this is not for the faint of heart or any PETA advocate. (A few spots in here left me cringing, and I'm no animal rights activist). It is the tale of a devoted taxidermist, and his curious wives, and Teddy Roosevelt and an odd pet monkey and a large and memorable cast of characters. The text moves along quickly, brilliantly and beautifully written.My only complaint, and I see it's shared by others, has to do with the many assumptions the writer makes about what people are thinking and feeling. I appreciate his resources, but these hardly account for everything. "Really? Was she really thinking this?" I wondered when Kirk would write what Carl's plucky wife, Mickie, was "feeling" along the journey. Or "Was that really what Carl thought?" when Kirk wrote of what was going on in Carl's mind while he filled the bodies of dead animals. It does serve to move the story along, making it almost movie-like, but it left me concerned that this wasn't so much a biography as a historical novel.I also would have appreciated just a bit more of information about Carl outside of his taxidermy life. Some was there, but I would have welcomed another chapter on his childhood, and perhaps a bit less about his jungle life.I would recommend this book to just about anyone, though keep in mind you're likely to pause, too, at the author's certainty as to what the main characters were thinking and feeling - and don't read this while eating.
    • 4/5
      A biography of Carl Akeley, a late 19th/early 20th century taxidermist whose accomplishments, among other things, included helping to stuff Jumbo the elephant, inventing a new kind of camera for wilderness filming, and making multiple trips to Africa in a rather painfully ironic attempt to preserve the continent's rapidly vanishing animals for posterity by killing lots of them.Akeley's life story is an interesting one (even if I do find his vocation a little creepy and am in general inclined to root for the animal over the hunter), and he lived in undeniably interesting times. Despite which I found this book a little hard to get into, largely due to the writing style. Much of it is written more like a novel than a biography, with descriptions of details, thoughts and emotions that, assuming the author isn't a mind-reading time traveler, are inevitably speculative and embellished. Whether or not this sort of thing works for a reader may be largely a matter of taste, but I do think there are some ways in which it's objectively problematic. For one thing, it blurs the boundary between fact and fiction just enough to make it unclear how much any of it can be trusted. The author does discuss where he gets his assumptions about his subjects' emotional states from and the extent to which various passages are or aren't supported by evidence in the endnotes, but I didn't find that a particularly satisfying solution to the problem. And this approach also makes for some awkwardness in the writing any time the author wants to take a step back from the personal accounts to put things in a broader context, as well as in the places where information about specific events simply isn't available. All of which might be forgivable if it made for a truly compelling read, but the writing in the more novelistic sections is often kind of overdone, full of emotional outbursts, exclamation points, and slightly overwrought turns of phrase, as if he didn't quite trust the subject matter to be exciting enough in itself. Which, honestly, it could have been.I will add that there is one respect in which this choice of writing style does work very nicely, which is that it lets the more disturbing attitudes of the times -- colonialism, racism, a deeply conflicted and often destructive approach to nature -- speak for themselves. Very effectively so, in fact, with no excuses offered and no 21st century moralizing necessary. But, even so, I would have much preferred a more traditional non-fiction approach. As it is, I did find it worth reading, but just not as engaging as it should have been.

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    Kingdom Under Glass - Jay Kirk

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