Mediawan, Sony Execs Predict A European TV Project Will Soon Be Same Quality As American But For Half The Cost - MIA Market The entire book flows along very well. You cannot help but learn a great deal about many, varied subjects, painlessly. You will find yourself at times pulling for Rist, and yet at times disgusted by his greed. You wonder how the author found the willpower to keep going on in his investigation, when he hits so many dead ends.

Deciding to read The Feather Thief should really come down to how much you want to know about birds. Birds are animals I'm perfectly willing to appreciate at a distance but, barring a series of childhood budgies, they've never been my particular thing. All the same, I've got mad respect for Darwin, Wallace, and their culture-rupturing scientific discovery made possible by tropical birds, so I thought this book would be up my alley. Johnson’s narrative entertainingly recounts not just Rist’s strange story but that of the pioneering Victorian ornithologists too New Statesman I happened to be a bit too familiar with the related history – I’ve read a lot of books that touch on Alfred Russel Wallace, whose specimens formed the core of the Tring collection, as well as a whole book on the feather trade for women’s hats and the movement against the extermination, which led to the formation of the Audubon Society (Kris Radish’s The Year of Necessary Lies). This meant that I was a little impatient with the first few chapters, but if you are new to these subjects you shouldn’t have that problem. For me the highlights were the reconstruction of the crime itself and Wallace’s inquiry into whether the Asperger’s diagnosis was accurate and a fair excuse for Rist’s behavior. To not give the entire book away, Rist burglarizes the museum, and makes away with hundreds of the rare birds. It seems that he has committed the perfect crime, as he gets away with it for quite a while. Eventually, people become suspicious of Rist, as he seems to have an unending suppy of the feathers for sale (the feathers can be sold, if it can be proven that they were obtained before the CITES treaty went into effect). He is arrested, but is given a slap on the wrist and released.All in all, I highly recommend this book. To sportsmen, to crime buffs, to pyschology students, and to anyone else who loves a good mystery. Kirk Johnson is a good guy. I like him. His story before writing about the theft of museum specimens involves life in the US Agency for International Development, deployment in Iraq, and work on the rehoming of Iraqi refugees; his humanitarian interests and hard work in those areas is discussed, where appropriate, here and there in the book. This helps, I feel, ground things with a moral centre which never leaves any doubt that Johnson is honestly interested in doing the best, or right, thing. Which I feel is crucial, since there are occasions in the book where he reports discussions with people – Rist among them – who imply that theft from museums is ok and should even be encouraged. When I told him that one of Edwin's customers was in fact a dentist, Prum laughed. Calming down a little, he went on. 'What I see is a story of the struggle for authenticity . . . to try to make what people are doing meaningful. What they've done is enshrined this in a period where English fishermen were members of a colonial power that ruled the entire globe and could extract fascinating things from it, then sell them in commercial markets. Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist-deep in a river in New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide first told him about the heist. But what would possess a person to steal dead birds? And had Rist paid for his crime? In search of answers, Johnson embarked upon a worldwide investigation, leading him into the fiercely secretive underground community obsessed with the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying.

The Feather Thief is a delightful read that successfully combines many genres – biography, true crime, ornithology, history, travel and memoir – to tell the story of an audacious heist of rare bird skins from the Natural History Museum at Tring in 2009. Somehow I managed not to hear about it at the time, but it was huge news in terms of museum collections and endangered species crime. The tendrils of this thorny case wind around Victorian explorers, tycoons, and fashionistas through to modern obsessions with music, fly-fishing and refugees. The story takes us to the times where explorers first started to travel overseas to discover and collect bird species for scientific research. It then explores how these discoveries lead bird feathers to be used brutally in fashion and hobbies like fly-tying. There's a lot of research and information without dumping it on us in a boring way. The book is written in a very engaging language, making the subject matter interesting somehow. While Rist was eventually caught, his legal troubles didn’t turn out the way I had anticipated,which is one of the reasons why Johnson felt compelled to draw out as much of the truth as possible.Ahoy there mateys! This be one a true crime book about one of the greatest naturalist thefts of all time – of bird skins from the British Museum of Natural History. The reason – their feathers for use in fishing lures. Aye matey, ye did read that correctly. Fishing lures that aren’t even used to fish. Who would think that that would be a big business? Well this book looks into the theft of the birds by a 20 year old flutist studying in London. That part ended unsatisfactorily by me standards. But this is more than just about that crime. This also looks into the history of the feather trade – like how women’s fashion almost decimated song birds. It discusses the theory of evolution and how Darwin had a competitor in Alfred Russel Wallace, the bird collector of many of those stolen skins. It talks about the history of fly fishing – which is weirder beyond belief. Such historical forays were interesting. While the poor handling of the crime angered me beyond belief (through no fault of the author), the book kept me interested in topics that, before this book, I would have found boring. This gem of a book, is marvelous, moving, and transcendent. I can’t stop thinking about it Dean King, author of Skeletons on the Zahara Initially, the story of the Tring heist—filled with quirky and obsessive individuals, strange birds, curio-filled museums, archaic fly recipes, Victorian hats, plume smugglers, grave robbers, and, at the heart of it all, a flute-playing thief—had been a welcome diversion from the unrelenting pressure of my work with refugees.” How is it that Rist was never truly admonished for this remarkable, costly, destructive theft? In recounting the 2011 court case, Johnson describes how the judge decided – seemingly on the basis of his own incredulity about Rist’s actions – that Rist must surely suffer from Asperger’s syndrome, this being the catalyst which inspired the ‘Asperger’s defence’. As Rist himself later expressed in an interview with Johnson, the court fell for this hook, line and sinker, and they shouldn’t have. It was a travesty.