Why on earth would a talented musician risk a prison term by stealing a bunch of bird skins? A fascinating new book provides the answer while exploring the bold derring-do of naturalists, the batty heights of Anglo-American eccentricity, and the high price of our never-ending attraction to beauty in nature ... one of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books you're ever likely to read ... Johnson is an intrepid journalist who doesn't mind venturing into the arcane world of, say, a Victorian salmon-fly-tying symposium held at a DoubleTree in New Jersey. He also has a fine knack for uncovering details that reveal, captivate, and disturb.
The author’s relentless pursuit of a solution to that mystery not only breaks down the crime itself but also follows the eccentric histories of 'feather fever'—the Victorian fad that turned bird feathers into the height of fashion accessories—and fly tying (which dates back at least to the Macedonians of the third century AD). Way more interesting than you’d think a book about a guy who stole some dead birds could possibly be, this is a remarkably compelling story of obsession and history and a man who so loved his art that he would break the law for it.
So it goes: an unending (it seems) struggle, Mr. Johnson writes, between 'humans bound across centuries by the faith-based belief that these birds were worth preserving' and 'centuries of men and women who looted the skies and forests for wealth and status.' Johnson has written a fascinating book about that struggle—the kind of intelligent reported account that alerts us to a threat and that, one hopes, will never itself be endangered.
This is one weird-but-true story ... By the end of Kirk Wallace Johnson's absorbing book, The Feather Thief, we readers learn more than we probably ever wanted to know about feathers. But, we may also come to understand why it's important, ecologically speaking, to care about what happened to the feathers of what Johnson calls, 'the missing birds of Tring' ... Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller ... I won't tell you how Johnson's gallant search for the missing birds ends. But it's depressing to learn, as we do early on in this book, that Edwin Rist, the feather thief, never served any time in prison. In the eyes of the law, perhaps all those old feathers didn't amount to much.
The Feather Thief reminded me of that long list of TV shows about male sub-cultures with their own sub-ethics, starting with The Sopranos through Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Other people’s obsessions can be hard to swallow, but Johnson, a versatile storyteller, makes this world almost sympathetic, just like the TV shows do ... It’s a remarkable story Johnson tells with novelistic skill.
It is all a bit mad. Johnson, a wonderfully assured writer, takes us on a curious journey into the past ... By taking us into a strange world of militant hobbyists, Johnson has enriched my store of useless knowledge. The salmon, for instance, is a bit of a bruiser — 'Salmon don’t lunge at an angler’s fly because it resembles an insect: they attack it because it’s a foreign object in the place where they’ve just buried their eggs.' The Feather Thief proves that the most obscure, 'candy-ass' activities can be made interesting for the general reader. Johnson makes his tale as vivid and arresting as a quetzal’s tail.
Johnson draws a fascinating portrait of Rist as a self-rationalizing con man and exposes the culture of secrecy and opportunism that marks his fellow fly-tiers. Still, Johnson’s self-aggrandizing pronouncements ('no one else was going to hunt them down but me') can be grating, as is his tendency to lapse into pumped-up, cliché-ridden prose.
A captivating tale of beautiful, rare, priceless, and stolen feathers ... Everything the author touches in this thoroughly engaging true-crime tale turns to storytelling gold ... Throughout, Johnson’s flair for telling an engrossing story is, like the beautiful birds he describes, exquisite ... A superb tale about obsession, nature, and man’s 'unrelenting desire to lay claim to its beauty, whatever the cost.'
Johnson (To Be a Friend Is Fatal) makes his true-crime debut with this enthralling account of a truly bizarre crime ... The result is a page-turner that will likely appeal to science, history, and true crime readers.
