Jay Kirk

An absolutely gut-wrenching and horrific book for any animal lover. It's a book about a famous taxidermist, so you go into it knowing animals will die, but the author seemed intent on making things as graphic as possible and depicting all the characters as being bloody minded eugenicists.
He mentions , sort of in passing, that Akeley believed what he was doing was necessary to preserve these animals that were inevitably going to disappear and does give him credit in the end for helping set up the first gorilla preserve.
The hunting isn't even the worst of it , though, the "kidnapped" monkey and the poor desperate and lonely woman who holds it captive while seemingly understanding it is wrong and suffering the horrible guilt in consequence, was the worst, almost unbearable. One senses the author's sympathies were with Mrs. Akeley and the monkey. An interesting if unsettling read… (mehr)

Thanks to Netgalley for my ARC.

Avoid the Day is one of the few can't put it down memoirs I have ever read. Specifically the third. The only other memoirs that I have read that is this good although very different was Aleksandar Hemon duality My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You and Simon Sellar's Applied Ballardianism Memoir from a Parallel Universe . The writing in Avoid the Day is superb - the subject matter is delightfully hard to categorize mystery? mystery memoir? historical memoir? journalistic memoir? Also vampires and music. Jay Kirk is spinning a of plates here and with great skill. His observations are maddeningly good. Every sentence makes you, or at least me, wish that I could put my own jumbled thoughts together so wonderfully. The writing is clear and a has a bluntl brute force approach to the world.

More than anything what strikes me is what strikes me about the Aleksandar Hemon and Simon Sellars memoirs the insane imagination that it puts forth about things, ideas, people, himself, and the word. Its the exact sort of escapism that you need right now. Its just perfect. The book is, to jam it into a category much less description is a travelouge about a writer, Jay Kirk, who is seeking to distance him self from his childhood hometown of Vermont by way of the Artic circle, Bela Bartok, the Hungarian countryside, Transylvania, Vampires, through the lense of drink, drugs and frazzled to highly focused states of mind.

This is a surrealist fever dream of a memoir. Its what you need as you enter the 50th pandemic burnout of the year.

Highly recommend.… (mehr)

3.5 stars

Carl Akeley (1864-1926) was a famous taxidermist, most notable for setting up dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. He spent much time in Africa with this two successive wives, on hunting safaris, looking for the perfect specimens for scientific posterity.

I had a bit of a hard time with this. It’s an interesting story and he had an interesting life (he also invented a few things, one of them highlighted in the book being a video camera to take nature videos), but I had a really hard time with the hunting – in my mind, it was just glorified trophy hunting. So wasteful – he would kill animals, but not even use them because they were not exactly what he was looking for for his imagined displays for the museum. He later did help start a sanctuary for gorillas, but only after he’d killed the ones he wanted, and he continued to kill other animals after. It did read like fiction, but the author has notes at the end to explain where he got much of his information and where he “expanded” and how he came to decide on telling it that way.… (mehr)

Taxidermy, especially at the museum level fascinates me as a merger of science and art. Carl Akeley is considered to be the father of modern taxidermy, and this book follows his life from boyhood to dying on his last trip to Africa. Jay Kirk takes some liberties depicting scenes using words people said from various memoirs or letters, but I appreciated it as it kept an interesting narrative for a fascinating man. Also included: Teddy Roosevelt, attitudes about conservation and evolution from the turn of the century, and shooting things in the name of science.

Also, FINALLY finished it. Started it last summer but had to return it to the library, school library didn't have a copy, and finally found one here in Boise during my midsummer class. Huzzah for taking one off my currently reading shelf~… (mehr)