The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

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One summer evening in 2009, twenty-year-old musical prodigy Edwin Rist broke into the British Natural History Museum, home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world. Or was he hopelessly addicted to feathers, to his hobby, and to his status as a young fly-tying protégé without the economic means to realise his dreams and potential? According to Deadline, The Feather Thief has been optioned by Jenna Bush Hager for Universal International Studios, a division of Universal Studio Group. Johnson begins to lay out his own obsession with the case of stolen bird feathers and heads out on what ends up being a pretty exciting investigation. I found it such a chore to get through that I become thoroughly dispirited and bored, and I put the book down and left it for months.

Johnson ( To Be a Friend Is Fatal) makes his true-crime debut with this enthralling account of a truly bizarre crime…. That’s right: museum specimens were stolen so that they could be ripped to shreds and turned into fishing flies.The fashion of feathers, first begun by Marie-Antoinette in 1775, a century later led to two hundred million North American birds being killed every year. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. The invention of the automobile put the huge hat industry to an end, since women were unable to hold their heads up with these atrocities.

He started by attending a fly-tying symposium, where he felt like an outsider and even received vague threats: Rist was now a no-go subject for this community. Who knew a crime about a man stealing a historical collection and thousands of dollars worth of dead birds from a museum so he could use the feathers to make salmon fly catchers could be so fascinating! However, he soon realizes that this heist has far more significance to humankind and our relationship to the natural world. You wonder how the author found the willpower to keep going on in his investigation, when he hits so many dead ends. My craving for adventure came in the story of Alfred Russell Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin, whose first expedition to collect specimens in exotic places ended with all being lost in a ship fire.Each reader would come up with a different list of who or what was affected by the events that are related in this book. I found myself trying the limits of my aural capacity, speeding up the narrator's voice to a comical clip as he talked about the history of bird collections and the fly-tying community. Wallace in later life, a photo from 1895; at right, images showing Walter Rothschild, plus the cover of the most valuable book that discusses Rothschild and his life.

Like it or not, the Edwin Rist episode is now an important, indeed instructional, part of ornithological and museum history. let me just tell you this book was super interesting from beginning to end, and read like a thriller that I couldn’t put down. You know your life has taken a wrong turn if you’re sidling up to burly men with handlebar moustaches and furtively asking: “Got any chatterer?Deciding to read The Feather Thief should really come down to how much you want to know about birds. An online friend told him he should check out Tring – the museum Walter Rothschild’s financier father built for him as a twenty-first birthday present – when he got to London. This meant that I was a little impatient with the first few chapters, but if you are new to these subjects you shouldn’t have that problem. Plagued by PTSD, he turned to fly-fishing as therapy, and this was how he heard about the curious case of Edwin Rist, who stole the bird specimens from Tring to sell the bright feathers to fellow hobbyists who tie elaborate Victorian-style fishing flies.