Product Description

The natural history museum is a place where the line between "high" and "low" culture effectively vanishes--where our awe of nature, our taste for the bizarre, and our thirst for knowledge all blend happily together. But as Stephen Asma shows in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, there is more going on in these great institutions than just smart fun. Asma takes us on a wide-ranging tour of natural history museums in New York and Chicago, London and Paris, interviewing curators, scientists, and exhibit designers, and providing a wealth of fascinating observations. We learn how the first museums were little more than high-toned side shows, with such garish exhibits as the pickled head of Catherine the Great's lover. In contrast, today's museums are hot-beds of serious science, funding major research in such fields as anthropology and archaeology. "Rich in detail, lucid explanation, telling anecdotes, and fascinating characters.... Asma has rendered a fascinating and credible account of how natural history museums are conceived and presented. It's the kind of book that will not only engage a wide and diverse readership, but it should, best of all, send them flocking to see how we look at nature and ourselves in those fabulous legacies of the curiosity cabinet."--The Boston Herald.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #274928 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Science museums can be illuminating, exciting, and disturbing--just like the collectors that make them possible. In Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums Scholar Stephen T. Asma turns his professional curiosity about preserving bodies into an engrossing, wide-ranging exploration of the nature of these places and their curators. He brings a refreshing vitality to a subject usually thought boring, if not morbid. Asma's writing ranges from expositive to chatty and occasionally feels like a travelogue or memoir as he investigates the American Museum of Natural History, the Galerie d'anatomie comparée, and other collections in the US and Europe; this informality keeps the reader engaged throughout. Referring to the process of skeletonising specimens--while maintaining his hold on all but the most sensitive--he writes:

I stepped into the foulest, most pestiferous stench you can imagine ... Inside each tank were thousands of dermestid beetles, otherwise known as flesh-eating beetles, blissfully chewing the meaty chunks and strands off the bones. Each bug was no bigger than a watermelon seed, but en masse they could strip a skeleton clean in two short days.

To Asma's credit, the bulk of the text is less a gross-out festival than a consideration of the hard, sometimes obsessive work of the men and women behind the displays. He examines the role of museums and collectors in the great evolutionary debates of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the future of these institutions as they come more and more to depend on corporate largesse. Equally enlightening and entertaining, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads is a perfectly exhibited specimen. --Rob Lightner

Review
"After reading this book museum-goers will not be able to look at exhibits in the same way again", avows the author. He could be right New Scientist As full of curious facts and mental treats as any museum display, this fascinating book shows there is more behind the museum facade than a few busy biologists New Scientist

New Scientist
"As full of curious facts and mental treats as any museum display, this fascinating book shows there is more behind the museum facade than a few busy biologists"