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Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum
by: Richard Fortey

Used Price: $21.12

Binding: Hardcover
EAN: 9780007209880
Format: Import
ISBN: 0007209886
Label: HarperPress
Manufacturer: HarperPress
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: January 07, 2008
Publisher: HarperPress
Sales Rank: 999179
Studio: HarperPress

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Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

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- Reflections on the past, present and future state of nature in the human world
London's Natural History Museum, a place of many treasures, offers many surprises - and natural scientist Richard Fortey provides tour of the museum unlocking not only its contents, but a lively history of the discipline itself. Chapters follow explorers, scientists, collection methods and categorization challenges, offering a fine blend of biography, natural science and museum collecting history, and reflections on the past, present and future state of nature in the human world.

Rating:

- Uneven - Some good parts but it overstays its welcome
This is a book I really wanted to like - I've always enjoyed museums and science and an inside look at one of the world's great museums sounded promising. Richard Fortey spent his entire adult life working at the British Natural History Museum and he has acquired a vast amount of anecdotes, history and experiences.

The book is a mix of museum history, science and sketches of the people who work or worked at the museum. Some parts are excellent while others are boring or repetitive. Halfway through the book I grew bored with portrait after portrait of a museum employee who had spent their life studying some family of obscure critters. In addition, he seems to go on and on trying to justify the importance of his work and reminiscing about how things were better in the good old days; when he was young the museum employees were left to their own devices, when he was young nobody could be fired no matter ... Read More

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- The Museum, the Scientists and their Specimens
About a month ago, (September 2008) I had a chance to hear Richard Fortey himself lecturing about this book. The lecture, very fittingly, was happening in a natural history museum. As his lecture unfolded, I found myself with many of the most interesting characters that have ever contributed to natural history, both famous and obscure. I also learned about what goes on behind the scenes of the museum, and of some of the many interesting and strange specimens which are not on display, such as an "accursed amethyst" and the famous rock from Mars which is said by some to contain fossils. After the lecture was over, I went home and started reading the book, and found the written account of these things and people to be just as engaging as it was to hear Richard Fortey speaking. It is like recieving your own guided tour through the Natural History Museum of London, and even through the history of natural history. Richard ... Read More

Rating:

- Night at the museum with a personal tour guide
Behind-the-scenes look at London's Natural History Museum is an interesting peak at the "coalface"--Fortey's term for the daily work occurring beyond and below the public galleries--of museum science. Fortey describes the main work of the Museum, and its sister institutions in other countries, as systematic taxonomy--the attempt to exhaustively categorize and collect reference examples of each species of plant, animal, and mineral.

In an era of hard-to-obtain research grants and declining public funding, Fortey defends this work as valuable for several reasons:

--the need to find and identify species before they are destroyed by climate change, environmental destruction, or over-harvesting.

--potential beneficial uses of unknown species for the biosphere, for example expanded use of natural predators as environmentally-safe pesticides.

--helping future scientific endeavors ... Read More

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