Hurry - Only 3 left in stock!
|
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Wonder
2 Beauty
3 Spectacle
4 Order
5 Narrative
6 Allegory
7 Remembrance
Notes
Index
Rachel Poliquin is a writer and curator engaged with the cultural and poetic history of the natural world. She has curated taxidermy exhibits for the Museum of Vancouver, Canada and the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Poliquin is the author of ravishingbeasts.com, a website dedicated to exploring the cultural history of taxidermy.
“I have long been a fan of Rachel Poliquin’s otherworldly online
museum, www.ravishingbeasts.com, but after reading The Breathless
Zoo I know just what she means when she says that all taxidermy,
like storytelling, is ‘deeply marked by human longing.’ I am
already longing to read The Breathless Zoo again.”—Jay
Kirk,University of Pennsylvania, author of Kingdom Under Glass
“With The Breathless Zoo, Rachel Poliquin has made a major
contribution to the blossoming field of animal studies. This book
is the new benchmark on the place of taxidermy in the social
history of art, science, and popular culture. Marvelous, rigorous,
and extensively well researched, the work is also refreshingly
pleasurable to read. Throughout, Poliquin explores the complex
questions around the rich cultural texture of taxidermy. And unlike
other works on the topic, The Breathless Zoo examines not only what
taxidermy is but also what it means. For those of us engaged in
thinking about animals, this is the book on the culture of
taxidermy we have long awaited—a book of great innovation that
slices through the history of science, blood sports, and art.”—Mark
Dion
“The Breathless Zoo is an intriguing and poetic meditation on an
unlikely subject: stuffed animals in European museums that seem so
familiar and so intellectually musty. Rachel Poliquin teases out of
them not just a typological order but also a human longing for
beauty and wonder, story and allegory. In the dead specimens she
finds immortality; in their stasis, movement across the world. The
result is a rich panorama of human ideas and desires.”—Marina
Belozerskaya,author of The Medici Giraffe
“The Breathless Zoo is the book that the subject of taxidermy has
long deserved. Full of provocative opinions, beautifully expressed,
it is a subtle and thoroughly engaging exploration of the difficult
question posed by all present-day encounters with taxidermy: ‘What
is this animal-thing now?’”—Steve Baker,author of The Postmodern
Animal
“What do Roy Rogers’ horse, Trigger, Jumbo the Barnum and Bailey
circus elephant, and Dolly the cloned sheep all have in common?
They were all stuffed. Or, to be more precise, they have all been
given life-after-death through the magic of taxidermy. They share
this fate with cats dressed in crinolines, ice-skating hedgehogs
and gophers doing, well, all manner of things. And with
hummingbirds in nineteenth-century glass cases at London’s Natural
History Museum and zebras on display at the Field Museum of Natural
History in Chicago. What is it that propels human beings to stuff
the dead bodies of other animals or birds? According to the author
of a new book on the subject, taxidermy is about longing—it is a
way of staving off the inevitable, of holding onto the past.
Vancouver writer and curator Rachel Poliquin presents a
delightfully thorough account of a practice that spans
centuries.”—Michael Enright CBC Sunday Edition
“A wealth of well-chosen illustrations, anecdotes, and deft
readings of individual pieces of taxidermy make The Breathless Zoo
a rich study that will appeal to a variety of readers.”—Anjuli Raza
Kolb Los Angeles Review of Books
“Rachel Poliquin's The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures
of Longing unearths much of the rich history and technology of
stretching and mounting skins, from seventeenth-century European
explorers to contemporary collectors and practitioners, along the
way packing in a large number of observations. . . . With a
detailed index and ample notes, this examination of taxidermy is a
useful resource that can support cross-disciplinary research in
art, cultural studies, and animal studies.”—Richard Graham Art
Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) Reviews
“It comes as no wonder that The New York Times included Rachel
Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo among its best coffee table books of
2012, calling it one among a privileged selection of titles that
‘make an impression.’Along with a rigorously researched and written
text, The Breathless Zoo offers up an aesthetically enviable book
design, which includes a collection of sumptuously colored images
that often amaze, as frequently unnerve, but always leave the
curious mind wanting more. The only thing truly bad about The
Breathless Zoo, in my humble estimation, is that I didn’t write
it.Poliquin’s book remains a visually and textually rich treasure
trove of knowledge, and should be required reading for anyone in
the field of animal studies, as well as anyone engaged in
disciplines that interrogate the history of nature and its various
representations, in word, image, and practice. We are fortunate to
have The Breathless Zoo at our disposal.”—Alissa A. Walls
Humanimalia
“Grounded in historical context, as well as current theoretical
methodology, The Breathless Zoo provides a well-rounded, reverent,
and provocative commentary on taxidermy.”—Ty Fishkind
Configurations
Ask a Question About this Product More... |