Certain to appeal to aspiring curators as well as anyone who has wondered what goes on behind the exhibitions.
An insider’s account of “what a natural history museum curator does.”
After more than 30 years as a research scientist at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, one of the world’s largest natural history museums, Grande (The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time, 2013, etc.) steps back to describe the inner workings of these institutions devoted to the study of biology, anthropology, geology, and human culture. Drawing on his own life and career, he reveals the critical role of curators whose fieldwork advances scientific knowledge and makes possible the exhibitions so popular with the museumgoing public. As a working-class kid from the Minneapolis suburbs, Grande was smitten by natural history when he received a 52-million-year-old fossil fish as a gift. He earned a doctorate in evolutionary biology, joined the Field Museum in 1983, and has spent several weeks each summer for the past four decades engaged in fieldwork in the fossil-rich Wyoming desert that produced the prized fish of his youth. In this profusely illustrated book, he captures the excitement of scientific discovery and the “passion and competitive drive” of successful curators as they pursue wide-ranging research interests in caves, oceans, rain forests, and other locations around the world. His thumbnail accounts of colleagues’ work involving everything from mushrooms and ants to meteorites and ancient civilizations offer readers an opportunity to watch top curators in action. Grande also provides detailed accounts of controversies, such as the legal battle over the museum’s iconic T. rex skeleton named SUE; the long-standing tensions between academic and commercial fossil collectors; and his field’s “fierce debates” about systematic methods. A strong believer in the need to help nonscientists understand science, the author brings curatorial work to life through absorbing stories about fossils, gems, and other natural objects and the men and women who find them.
Certain to appeal to aspiring curators as well as anyone who has wondered what goes on behind the exhibitions.Pub Date: March 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-226-19275-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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