The Extinction Club

Rating:
Summary: The Extinction Club
Review: An amazing, entertaining, illuminating and yet at times even infuriating piece of work.

At its base, the book is about the pere david deer, a species that exists only to be hunted. Extinct in the wild for hundreds if not thousands of years, a herd of deer stayed alive in a walled-off compound in China's Forbidden City for several centuries, where only the emperor was allowed to hunt them and eat their meat. A Western monk "discovered" the deer in the late 19th Century, and sent a few back to Europe, where they were admired for their unusual appearance. Soon after, a combination of factors during the Boxer Rebellion wiped out the Chinese herd, leaving a small British herd as the only survivors. The population now thrives, and some have even been returned to China, but the herds are essentially kept alive through money earned by rich folks paying thousands of dollars to shoot them.

But Twigger's book is much more than that. It's an examination of how he came to write the book; it's a personal history; it's a book full of self-doubts and false starts; it's an extended treatise on the nature of extinction (both of species and of skills). It jumps around from idea to idea, from setting to setting, from time period to time period, never telling a cohesive story until it all comes together in the end. At times, the book is so unusual it reads like fiction. (Reading the book, I began to doubt the pere david deer even existed, but a quick Google search found several photos of them online.)

Ultimately, this is an entertaining and thought-provoking book, even if it is a bit self-indulgent. Worth checking out.

Rating:
Summary: It all comes together in the end
Review: I also picked this up on the bargain rack. I was expecting a sort of research text on the deer. It actually is much more than that--it's part travelogue and part personal journey on the part of the author as well. He relates to us strange stories of bizarre people he meets in his research, thoughts on reading, various bits and pieces of history, and an ongoing story about trying to find a secondhand bookstore in Cairo. As I read it, I was enjoying it, but it felt rather fractured...up until the last few pages where he brings all the threads into the book together into one common theme, making me shake my head at the control he had over the various stories all along.

Rating:
Summary: Perfect.
Review: I picked this book up on the bargain rack of my local bookstore. I don't like to pass up a chance for a low-priced hardcover, and am I ever glad I didn't.

Everyone will tell you this book is about deer. Not just any deer. Rare deer. But it's about so much more than that. Whether you see it as fact or fiction, or 'mostly true', the book is captivating. While seemingly hare-brained and madcap in its construction, the text flows together in a surreal way. Twigger penned the words perfectly, and it's a book not only for deer-lovers, but for writers, too.

Because much of the book is about writing another book and finding book stores and raiding libraries and the like, anyone who loves books should also love it. I suppose I must have gotten lucky, liking both books and deer, with a slight bent for villains like the Major.

It's hard to do the text justice. You'll just have to go read it yourself, I suppose.

Rating:
Summary: The Extinction Club
Review: The legendary deer known as the Milu, was thought to be extinct until a Basque missionary, Pere David stumbled upon them in the Chinese emperor's private park in the second half of the 19th century. Pere David smuggled a specimen to Europe igniting in the process, a clamour among several European nations to acquire a live animal. Eventually the Boxer rebellion led to the deer's extirpation from China but a herd survived in England on the private estate of the 11th Duke of Bedford. Robert Twigger's tale is a mix of whimsical, sometimes cheeky romps through history, and modern day divergences into the meaning of truth, myths and evolution.