Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder
Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Techno logy
1 of 1 copy available
Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit—some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins of both art and science.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 20, 2013 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307833983
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307833983
- File size: 4776 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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November 25, 1996
New Yorker staff writer Weschler probes into L.A.'s highly unusual Museum of Jurassic Technology in this NBCC finalist. -
October 2, 1995
As in previous books such as Shapinsky's Karma, Boggs's Bills and Other True-Life Tales, Weschler, a staff writer for the New Yorker, explores with detail and delight some knotty questions of culture and trickery. The first half of the book is an expanded version of an article he wrote for Harper's and ruminates about the little-known Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, querying its elfin, straight-faced founder/proprietor, David Wilson, and tracking the detailed yet mainly bogus tales behind Wilson's elaborate sham artifacts. Such adventures lead Weschler to muse on the nature of museums and of wonder, and, in the book's second half, to recount the further investigations spurred by readers' letters. The impulse to inventory oddities, he observes, dates back to Europeans' wonderment at the New World. Wilson, he concludes, has tapped ``into the premodern wellsprings of the postmodern temper.'' Slight, but memorable. Illustrations.
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