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A review by sevenlefts
Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey
4.0
Kind of read this on a whim, but I'm very glad I did. I spent a college semester in London back in the 80s, and although the Natural History Museum was less than a mile from where I lived, and I must have walked by it dozens of times, I never visited it. I have no idea why. Something to do with the priorities of youth, I suppose.
Fortey takes the reader on a anthropological, cultural and historical tour of the museum. He very cleverly does this managing to avoid laundry lists and a systematic department-by-department inventory. And at the same time, the book is all about taxonomy and, well, systematics. All this is he does a fine of job of making a dry subject very palatable.
His take on the cultural shifts in the Museum, moving from the tenured pre-war years of the class-conscious civil service and eccentric scientists toward the more modern grant- and visitor-focused modern era is quite good. His early chapters on taxonomy and systematics are quite entertaining. Even the chapter on mineralogy held my interest.
Much of the book centers on the role of the Natural History Museum in scholarship and the expansion and transmission of human knowledge, especially in th area of identifying the world around us. As he states toward the end of the book, "Ever species on Earth has a story tell. But the first stage will always be the naming of names."
Fortey takes the reader on a anthropological, cultural and historical tour of the museum. He very cleverly does this managing to avoid laundry lists and a systematic department-by-department inventory. And at the same time, the book is all about taxonomy and, well, systematics. All this is he does a fine of job of making a dry subject very palatable.
His take on the cultural shifts in the Museum, moving from the tenured pre-war years of the class-conscious civil service and eccentric scientists toward the more modern grant- and visitor-focused modern era is quite good. His early chapters on taxonomy and systematics are quite entertaining. Even the chapter on mineralogy held my interest.
Much of the book centers on the role of the Natural History Museum in scholarship and the expansion and transmission of human knowledge, especially in th area of identifying the world around us. As he states toward the end of the book, "Ever species on Earth has a story tell. But the first stage will always be the naming of names."