The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession and the Natural History Heist of the Century, by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Is this book autobiography?  Memoir?  Is it the story of a quest for the answers to an absorbing crime story with an uncertain ending?  Is it scientific history?  Answer: All of the above!  In weaving together these several strands, this non-fiction tale led to provocative discussion. 

Kirk Wallace Johnson opens his tale autobiographically:  He’s suffering from PTSD in the aftermath of the war in Iraq.  His current work, seeking to resettle Iraqi interpreters in the US, meets with limited success and constant frustration.  To relieve his depression, he takes up fly-fishing.  From his guide, he learns about fly-tying, the creation of beautiful works of art that are ostensibly for use as hooks to attract salmon.  In reality, these salmon flies are almost never actually used to fish.  They are bought and sold and hoarded as the works of art they are.  Trouble is, however, that the “best” require the use of rare and expensive bird feathers, many from extinct or near-extinct birds. 

As the author enters the world of the fly-tiers, he starts to hear of a theft from the British Museum’s ornithological collection held at the Tring Museum outside London.  This theft was accomplished by a young man, barely out of his teens, named Edwin Rist.  To explain not only the lure of the beautiful bird feathers that drew Rist to the heist, but also the scientific value of the birds taken, the author discovers the work of naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who in the middle years of the 19th century, traversed the Malay Archipelago where he gathered and catalogued over 125,000 specimens of rare birds.  His meticulous efforts to tag the date and location of each skin, as the bird carcasses are called, led him independently from Charles Darwin to arrive at the theory of evolution via natural selection.  

But what of Edwin Rist?  Rist is an American young man studying flute at the Royal Conservatory in London, hoping to be selected to play with a major European orchestra when his studies are completed.  He is also an up-and-coming expert fly-tier, featured in the fly-tying world’s website as “the future of fly-tying.”  He needs money to purchase the exotic bird feathers to use in tying his flies.  His visit to the Tring museum awakens him to the possibilities of securing a supply of rare feathers for his own fly-tying and of a steady source of income from feather sales to other fly-tiers.  

The subtitle speaks of obsession and there are many to examine in this book.  There is, first, the scientific obsession of Alfred Russell Wallace, the collector of the specimens, who from his lower-class origins sought academic recognition that was at the time only granted to upper class Britons.  There is Edwin Rist’s obsession with tying classic fishing flies that motivates the theft.  And there is the author’s own obsession with the crime and with recovering feathers for the museum, an obsession that has therapeutic value in alleviating his PTSD symptoms.   

Fly-tying with exotic feathers has exerted an obsessive pull on anglers and on pure hobbyists, with an upsurge of interest in the late 20th century.  With that enthusiasm comes the obsessions that fuel an underground market in rare and often illegal feathers.  Edwin Rist fell into this obsession as a young teenager.  He was later arrested and tried for the theft, was found guilty but lightly punished with a short period of probation after pleading incapacity due to Asperger’s syndrome.  

Many of our discussions were prompted by the judicial treatment of the case.  Could the system do justice to all the interests of society?  The police were essentially done when Rist was identified and tried.  The prosecutor and judge felt limited by prior decisions on the Asperger defense.  The museum’s interest waned when the specimens that were recovered were missing their sourcing tags or had been cut into marketable parts.  The general silence of the “feather underground” made it more difficult to track the fate of the specimens.  What do we think should have been a just punishment or a restorative action imposed on Edwin Rist?  And could he have pulled this off alone?  

Where does the value of the specimens to the scientific community collide with the value of the birds as objects of true beauty that the public might want to see?  Fly-tiers ask:  “Why does the Museum need so many examples of the same bird anyway?”

The Feather Thief is a good read, provocatively posing questions to which different readers might well derive different answers.

— Jeanie and Bill Smith

 

Virgil Wander, Leif Enger

This quiet, gentle story is remarkable for the artistry of it words, the realistically oddball characters, and its touch of Northwoods magic realism. The main character, Virgil Wander, almost drowns when his car slides off the road and into Lake Superior. The accident damages his brain and, as a result, he quietly and gradually reinvents himself, leaving behind his hesitant, staid self—the “former occupant” of his apartment, clothes, and life. In his place is a man willing to take a few risks.

Comparing his flight into the lake with his new life, he says:

“A person never knows what is next—I don’t anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.” 

Virgil owns a down-on-its-luck movie theatre, the Empress, and is also Greenstone’s city clerk. (When he explains this latter job, he addresses the reader directly asking, “Did you think I made a living at the Empress?” It’s a delightfully engaging moment.)

After his plunge into the lake, Virgil has a unique mental quirk: He cannot remember adjectives. But no matter, Enger demonstrates the power of all parts of speech, in quote-worthy paragraph after paragraph, as Virgil creates a new life from the leftovers of his old one. The language alone makes the book a wonder to read.

For example, when Virgil first meets the mystical Rune, he describes how the old man smoked his pipe: “The smoke ghosted straight up and hung there undecided.” Who needs fancy adjectives when you can create an image so economically and so powerfully?

And when Virgil finds the ominous Adam Leer burning clothes behind his house, he again evokes the smoke-in-need-of-direction image, this time using an adjective in a way that makes the reader wonder why other writers haven’t used this description: “Tendrils of tea-colored smoke uncurled to explore the immediate region.”

Some lines are laugh-out-loud funny, as when Virgil observes, “The evidence of my life lay before me, and I was unconvinced.” 

Virgil, who narrates the book, introduces us to his community in the bad luck town of Greenstone, Minnesota, north of Duluth. Residents have landed there by chance, as Virgil did, lured by a lake view and cheap real estate; others were born there, as was the mysterious and sinister Leer; and then there’s the elfin Rune, who shows up on the shore of Lake Superior flying kites. 

But these are no ordinary kites—they’re so mystical that people passing by stop and wait their turns to fly the giant dog, or the bike with wheels that turn, a burning fireplace, or even an anvil. Rune is in town looking for stories of his son Alec, whom he never met, and who flew out over Lake Superior one day in a tiny old plane, never to return. Nadine, Alec’s widow, takes over his neon sign business, creating pieces of art she sells nationally; Virgil loves her from afar, assuming he has no chance with her, until he does. When the two finally connect, he observes, “She kept looking away then back to me, as though at a nice surprise. This was maybe best of all. I never once expected to be someone’s nice surprise.” 

Two fatherless boys, Bjorn and Galen, help pull Virgil toward himself and away from the previous tenant, aided by Ann and Jerry, married but not really, who are trying to move beyond the margins of their lives.  Then there’s a giant sturgeon, a bomb, a festival called Hard Luck Days, and a cameo by Bob Dylan, who wrote a song about Greenstone, but Virgil can’t remember which one. And a priceless set of old movie reels Virgil refers to as imps in a jar, and which get the Empress a new roof.

Like the kites, the characters’ lives move with slow precision and eventually reach a conclusion that ties the story lines and loose strings together. A few bits are left hanging (What actually did happen to Leer?) and some are tied up with a bit of sadness (Jerry’s luck gets harder, although he might have left the city better off).

Toward the end of the book, the community comes together for Virgil, who does not expect it, and he says, poignantly, “Your tribe is always bigger than you think.” 

At the very end, in Rune’s city of Tromsø, Norway, Nadine and Virgil face an unknown future, but with a fresh outlook that mirrors the theme of the book: “We all dream of finding but what’s wrong with looking? When the sun rises we’ll know what to do.”

—Pat Prijatel 

In The Garden of Beasts:Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson

This solidly researched account of Germany and the U.S. before World War II reads like a novel full of intigue, love affairs, disloyalty, honor, dishonor, evil, and power. Erik Larson tells the story from the unique perspective of the American ambassador from 1933-1938, William Dodd, and his family. Dodd was a scholar who was looking for an ambassadorship simply because he wanted to finish his three-volume book on the Old South. He ended up in Berlin because nobody else wanted the job—a fact he didnt realize until he was committed to the position.

Dodd was a Jeffersonian Democrat who chose to live on a budget and walk to work instead of being chauffered about in a giant gas guzzler, as was the custom of ambassadors. He remained a misfit during his entire time in Germany because he was not one of the wealthy elites who normally fill such posts. Initially, he argued away the threat of Hitler and the Nazi party, but ultimately he tried to warn the Roosevelt administration of the reality of Hitler’s danger to Germany and to the world. He was deemed an alarmist by his “colleagues” in Washington, and his warnings were dismissed as the work of an academic unqualified for diplomatic work.

Larson demonstrates how America and the German people might have stopped the pure evil that descended on Germany, but they chose to leave it to others, thinking it would get better on its own. Worse, many Americans at the time excused Hitler’s most despicable acts, reasoning that Jews caused their own problems.

Larson researched hundreds of books, artices, and newsreels, but relied heavily on Dodd’s papers and on his and his daughter’s autobiographies. The daughter, Martha Dodd, was a notorious partier who had affairs with Germans, Russians, and anybody in between. She was blindsided by Nazi charm, until their crimes became too obvious for her to ignore. Her story is a juicy counterpoint to her father’s more staid approach.

Larson shows the complexities of the era, creating in Dodd a character who has the guts to publicly decry Nazi policy, but who remains somewhat naive about the political web he’s caught in.  Likewise, Larson makes clear that, while many Germans remained complacent and complicit in Hitler’s evil, some even within the Nazi hierarchy tried to work against Hitler.

After Dodd was replaced as Ambassador, he toured the country, warning Americans of the true evil of Hitler’s regime. Even then, he was often seen as exaggerating.

—Pat Prijatel