A global cabinet of curiosities

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, compendia, collections

Atlas Obscura Wild Life, by Cara Giaimo and Joshua Foer and a host of contributors, does not lend itself to customary analysis. The authors could also be called editors, but by my estimate, they wrote about 40% of the material. The book could be called a brief, one-volume encyclopedia, but it is more of a compendium of encyclopedia articles and related items, drawn almost at random from a "warehouse" of more than thirty thousand half-page to two-page postings, the Atlas Obscura website.

The number of items exceeds 400, from nearly that many contributors (some folks wrote two or more). Various bits of "glue" and about 1/3 of the articles seem to have been written by Cara and Josh, as they like to be called. This is a typical 2-page spread:

This is a 2K image, so you can click on it for a larger version. Although the subtitle of the book is An Explorer's Guide to the World's Living Wonders, some articles, such as "The Dingo Fence" shown here, are related to living creatures, but not expressly about them. A "Wild Life of" interview is shown; there must be somewhere around 70 of these scattered through the book, but always adjacent to a focused article. The articles include a "How to see it" section, although in a few cases the advice is "see it online" because certain species are extinct, others are in restricted areas, and some just aren't worth the bother (one person interviewed has tried four times to go ashore on Inaccessible Island, without success; a unique bird species dwells there).

Another type of item is shown here, a kind of sidebar about creatures in some way related to the subject of the main article. This "Spray Toads" article is a bit longer than usual; most are one page or less.

Here is another type of item, a two-page spread on "Desert Lakes":

It occurred to me as I read that going to see even a tenth of the animals, plants and places presented in this book, you'd fill your passport with visa stamps, and perhaps need to renew it to get more space. There are even a few articles on life (or not) in Antarctica, the last of which, "Inanimate Zones" tells us of the most lifeless places on the planet. There it is stated, "There aren't a lot of good reasons to go up into the Transantarctic Mountains…"

As it is, a number of the subjects were familiar. In the "Deserts" section one article touched on "singing sands" and mentioned a dunes area near Death Valley in California. I've been there; pushing sand off the crest of a dune yields a rumble like a flight of bombers coming over the horizon. An article about seeds of a South American plant that have an awn that twists one way when damp, and the other way when drying out, reminded me of the "clock plant" (I don't know its name but it's related to wild oat) which has similar seeds, in Utah. Rattlesnakes get a couple of mentions. During a field mapping course in Nevada I walked among rattlesnakes daily, and learned a bit about some of their habits (they are terrified of big, thumping animals like us…and cattle. So they slither away, usually long before we might see them).

I read the book in sequence, but it is really a small-sized (just a bit smaller than Quarto at 7"x10½") coffee-table book, to be dipped into at random to refresh the mind here and there during the day. I enjoyed it very much.