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Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy |  | Author: Melissa Milgrom
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 84575
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1
ISBN: 061840547X
Dewey Decimal Number: 590.752
EAN: 9780618405473
ASIN: 061840547X
Publication Date: March 8, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2010: For many, taxidermy summons images of wildlife frozen in menacing poses, teeth bared in an eternal rictus; or maybe it's the lamented family cat, forever curled in purr-less slumber. With Still Life, Melissa Milgrom peels the skin back on Norman Bates's favorite pastime, dutifully tracking taxidermy from its 19th-century heyday (the beneficiary of a natural history boom), to its nadir as a reviled predilection in the age of PETA and conservation. It will tell most readers as much as they need to know about erosion-molded rats and replacement lips, ears, and eyelids, but it's the culture of iron-stomached men (and occasionally, women) that practice the art of skinned carcasses and stretched hides--those who wield "the calipers and the brain spoons"--that Milgrom's after. Beginning as a wide-eyed visitor to a third-generation stuff shop, she moves through an underworld of auctions, artisans, scientists, and the ultra competitive (albeit insular) World Taxidermy Championships, ultimately trying a queasy hand at squirrel-stuffing herself. Still Life an entertaining and illuminating adventure. --Jon Foro
Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Melissa Milgrom, Author of Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy 
Dear Amazon Reader, People--even my own parents!--ask what sparked my interest in taxidermy. I tell them that in 1994 I went on a safari gone awry, which led me to the family workshop of the last chief taxidermist of the American Museum of Natural History. I was expecting him to be creepy like Norman Bates in Psycho, but he was a gentle naturalist, and his studio with its skeletons and birds, the beauty and the strange tools, evoked Darwin's study. The contradiction pulled me in, and still does. Still Life took more than six years to write and that's because I had to shift my perception from one of skepticism to one of empathy and respect. I just saw Fantastic Mr. Fox and thought if Wes Anderson had been alive in the 1850s he'd have been a Victorian taxidermist, making little scenes of kittens dressed as brides. It's ironic--Victorians needed taxidermy to see exotic species from other continents, and we need taxidermists for the same reason--we long for animals as they disappear. Taxidermy evokes grandeur, which may help us comprehend the present mass extinction. Another reason I find taxidermy engrossing is because it combines art, science, and hunting. In Still Life I shadowed the most gifted taxidermist I could find in each area: an artist, a field naturalist, and a hunter, each of whom is on a quest to understand nature on its own terms. English sculptor Emily Mayer preserves animals for Damien Hirst's most provocative artworks; her dogs are so boggling you have to poke them to see if they will move. Ken Walker, the hunter from Alberta who recreates extinct species, is self-taught. He won the World Taxidermy Championships three times and was a Roy Orbison impersonator, which actually makes perfect sense. Taxidermy is like karaoke. The person who loves the singer the most gets the voice right. I hope you will enjoy the people you meet in Still Life whose obsessions and uncannily lifelike replicas create an art form that once was sublime and may be again. Melissa Milgrom (Photo © Ulalume Zavala)
A Look Inside the World Taxidermy Championships with Author Melissa Milgrom
(Click to Enlarge)  | | Ken Walker's Panda "Thing Thing"--recreated from bear skins-- Best of Show Recreations 2003 |
Product Description
It's easy to dismiss taxidermy as a kitschy or morbid sideline, the realm of trophy fish and jackalopes or an anachronistic throwback to the dusty diorama. Yet theirs is a world of intrepid hunter-explorers, eccentric naturalists, and gifted museum artisans, all devoted to the paradoxical pursuit of creating the illusion of life. Into this subculture of insanely passionate animal lovers ventures journalist Melissa Milgrom, whose journey stretches from the anachronistic family workshop of the last chief taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History to the studio where an English sculptor, granddaughter of a surrealist artist, preserves the animals for Damien Hirst's most disturbing artworks. She wanders through Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities in the final days of its existence to watch dealers vie for preserved Victorian oddities, and visits the Smithsonian's offsite lab, where taxidermists transform zoo skins into vivacious beasts. She tags along with a Canadian bear trapper and former Roy Orbison impersonator--the three-time World Taxidermy Champion--as he resurrects an extinct Irish elk using DNA studies and Paleolithic cave art for reference; she even ultimately picks up a scalpel and stuffs her own squirrel. Transformed from a curious onlooker to an empathetic participant, Milgrom takes us deep into the world of taxidermy and reveals its uncanny appeal.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 43
 happy customer July 14, 2010
Gary E. Warnock
The seller answered my question about delivery date and the book arrived a few days later. I'm very happy with the results.
Fascinating. June 23, 2010
Robert P. Beveridge (Cleveland, OH)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Melissa Milgrom, Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)
For some reason, I always seem to leave nonfiction to stew for quite a while before I review it. I finished this book close to two months ago (April 24th, and I'm writing the opening of this review on June 22nd) and still am not entirely sure what to say about it. I had the same problem with Bella Bathurst's The Wreckers, and while I didn't like this one quite as much as I liked that one, I still enjoyed this a great deal. So why is it that once again I find myself with so little to say that I'm padding this review with a paragraph of, essentially, nothingness? I don't have an answer. You probably don't either.
In any case, I once again discover evidence of my phenomenal thick-skulled-ness as it relates to certain issues. One of the prevailing themes of Milgrom's book is that taxidermy has been a fringe trade at the best of times over the centuries (and an outcast one at the worst of times), and she traces the history of the discipline with that thought never far from the surface. You know what? I never noticed. I always figured taxidermy was confined to hunting lodges and silly restaurants because that's where the hunters were, rather than there being some sort of invisible/artificial class barrier keeping stuffed animals out of finder drawing rooms everywhere. (As always, I'm simply ignoring the existence of the groups who try to have it criminalized, etc. They're not worth noticing, unless they're flinging paint on your fur.) And in that regard, this was quite an eye-opening book. Sometimes prejudice has to be pointed out to you before you see it.
The other tack Milgrom takes as she illuminates this much-neglected world is "taxidermy is an art, just as much as, say, sculpture." (Not a tossoff comparison, that, as Milgrom spends a decent amount of time with Damien Hirst's go-to taxidermist.) If you've read some books on the creation of art, you'll recognize Milgrom's language here, and to me at least it's a convincing argument; there's a lot of know-how and more than a little "you've gotta be born with it" to be had from everyone Milgrom spends time with. Ultimately, that's what art is.
I sometimes go out of my way to read books on subjects that normally I don't think I'd find interesting. I like to test my philosophy that any subject can be made interesting given the right author. And so far I've batted a thousand, whether it be microscopic parasites, the history of sewers, or an overview of taxidermy. There's a lot of fun nonfiction out there, and this qualifies. Worth checking out even if you don't think you have an interest in the subject. *** ½
A still life full of life June 14, 2010
Benoit Jacquin (New York)
Melissa Milgrom will take you from the Past to the Present, from the New World to the Old Europe, from dusty museum attics to flashy art galleries, and it will not let you go before your read the last word.
A documented journey through a little-known world, full of interesting facts and witty humor, during which you will meet very human beings.
Take a comfortable seat and enjoy!
Is taxidermy art? Is art taxidermy? June 10, 2010
Robert Schmidt (Honolulu, HI USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
What an interesting book! Author Melissa Milgrom does her homework as she explores the history and current status of "high-end" taxidermy. What the book is NOT is a "how-to-do-it" manual, and it is NOT an exploration of the "hook and bullet" taxidermy business. Instead, Milgrom identifies some of the most passionate and skilled people involved in the art and the science of preserving and recreating vertebrate animals.
So what IS taxidermy? "Taxidermy is the art of taking an animal's treated skin and stretching it over an artificial form such as a manikin, then carefully modeling its features in a lifelike attitude" (p. 5). One of the people she interviewed noted that poses should reflect "the nuance of nature, not the hand of man" (p. 38). This certainly wouldn't be a universal definition, but those high-end experts would thumb their noses at poses that don't reflect anatomy and behavior. As animal sculptor Emily Mayer (who calls herself an "anti-taxidermist") shared with Milgrom, "Real is REALLY real, and reality is unsettling, because it is often ugly and macabre" (p. 124).
These high-end taxidermists are perfectionists, no doubt. Those hairs in the nostrils need to be in the proper place, and there better be no sutures showing. The technical ability of the Schwendemans, the creative energy of Mayer, and the focused passion of Ken Walker, really are great examples of what this book is (about artists and their art) and what it is not (stuffing animals).
And when Milgrom bites the bullet and attempts her first mount, a gray squirrel, you feel her trials and want her to succeed, to make the squirrel reflect "the nuance of nature, not the hand of man."
Very interesting, and very well-written. Mounts have a finite life, so the history of taxidermy is really a history of the past 300 years. Milgrom gives you a fair taste of the characters, the competitions, and the efforts that go into making real... real.
World of Its Own June 2, 2010
Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA)
This book is a narrative exploration of the contemporary world of taxidermy. The author, Melissa Milgrom, was curious about the art of taxidermy. She immersed herself in the field, attending taxidermy conferences in both the US and Europe, and she interviewed a number of leading taxidermists to find out how they got started, and their approach to the art. She also tries out a little taxidermy herself, stuffing a squirrel under the patient tutelage of a renowned taxidermist. The book is not an introduction to taxidermy methods by any means, but it provides some background and human interest stories behind this little known field.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 43
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