Williams’s painstakingly detailed reporting reminds us that events like these are far more complicated than they might seem, and if we want the commercial fossil trade to be anything other than what it currently is, we must understand the intricate pushes and pulls of the industry ... this is where The Dinosaur Artist excels ... details and characters bring home the fact that the challenge of combating fossil smuggling and reforming the trade is truly daunting ... Williams consistently balances...the question of who ought to be able to own natural history, like fossils—offering a fair, balanced, and nuanced treatment of her subjects ... Part of the reason that the Tarbosaurus story is so compelling is that the fossil smuggler was, for once, caught, tried, and served time in jail, while the fossil was sent back. It’s a neat and tidy narrative.
One of the pleasures of The Dinosaur Artist is learning so much more than you thought you wanted to know about almost anything that wanders over the book’s horizon—such as the art of wading for sunken cypress logs or the intricacies of do-it-yourself fossil preparation or the recent history of Mongolian politics and its ties to American conservatives. Another is Williams’s prose: playful, allusive, and truly alive to the joy of trekking through a landscape full of quirks and quarries and sunken logs. Paige Williams is a reader’s ideal companion.
Ms. Williams’s writing is often concise and evocative ... But those characters also leave Ms. Williams’s narrative feeling padded, even at 278 pages ... it’s not clear how another potted biography here advances the story. Ms. Williams’s 89 pages of endnotes, including a lengthy account of the death of Pliny the Elder in A.D. 79, are also symptomatic of runaway research. But the story, when she sticks to it, is gripping and cinematic.
The life of a globe-trotting dinosaur smuggler might bring to mind Thomas Crown meets Tintin, but one of the revelations of the book is just how mundane the skulduggery of Prokopi’s crime actually was ... The strange underground world Prokopi inhabits inevitably brings us in contact with some serious oddballs, each of whom is introduced by Williams with the economy and evocative precision of a haiku. In affectless, purposeful prose we get a stream of increasingly strange and piquant factoids about these people, who seem to emerge straight out of a Coen brothers movie ... Williams so skillfully conceals the sausage-making of reporting that when we’re told, for instance, what someone was thinking while urinating in the desert in the middle of the night several years ago, we accept it as truth.
Although the dinosaur is undoubtedly in the details, as it were, the biographies of minor characters occasionally distract from the larger narrative. Especially fascinating, however, are the intertwined roles of paleontologists, collectors, and commercial hunters—all who covet fossils and feel a claim to natural history. In the spirit of The Feather Thief (2018), Williams’ illuminating chronicle questions who has a right to nature.
Williams capably takes on the political and fossil-rich history of Mongolia ... All these Mongolia-centered sections are strengthened by Williams's one-on-one interviews with major players ... The book does have some flaws. It's as if Williams felt compelled to include every last thing she learned through her research, even beyond the 90 dense pages of footnotes ... More disconcertingly, whenever the Tarbosaurus narrative gathers speed, Williams dumps in a sticky web of new names and facts to keep straight ... When the fossils and fossil fieldwork are given center stage, the pages turn fast.
If it’s tragedy you seek, The Dinosaur Artist won’t disappoint ... Paige Williams tells Prokopi’s story clearly and with sympathy. It’s easy reading. The only stumbling block is the 100 pages of notes ... Readers really interested in her account need to keep interrupting the story to check the notes to ensure they’re not missing something. It’s worth the trouble.
Williams provides just the right amount of context ... To this foundation of solid research, she adds a vivid storytelling style. The combination results in a triumphant book that will appeal to a wide audience.
An intriguing story of dinosaur smuggling ... The flow of her story of science and crime is sometimes interrupted—rather than enhanced—by lengthy descriptions of people and events. Passages about Prokopi’s dribbling wine down his shirt at an auction preview and his wife’s penchant for house-flipping convey little beyond the need for editing. At other times, the author’s deep reporting yields memorable passages on desert car caravans and the assembly of dinosaur skeletons ... Good fun for fossil freaks.
