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

Book Detail

Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Viking; 1st Edition edition (April 24, 2018) Language: English ISBN-10: 110198161X ISBN-13: 978-1101981610 Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.1 x 9.3 inches Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Book Description

As heard on NPR's This American Life â€œAbsorbing . . . Though it's non-fiction,Â The Feather ThiefÂ contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.â€ â€”Maureen Corrigan, NPRâ€™s Fresh Air â€œOne of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.â€Â â€”Christian Science Monitor A rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers ofÂ The Stranger in the Woods,Â The Lost City of Z, andÂ The Orchid Thief. On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skinsâ€”some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather themâ€”and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

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