Return of the Crazy Bird

Rating:
Summary: Slender volume but most interesting read
Review: At a young age, the author Clara Pinto-Correia heard about the long extinct dodo and became fascinated by the bird's fate. The end result is a well-researched and well-written text that takes the reader from the shores of Europe to a small chain of islands where the dodo and it's genetic cousins made their homes.

Sadly, the dodo and it's genetic cousins were doomed to extinction with the arrival of Europeans (starting with the Portuguese). The plump, flightless animals were slow breeders with a single offspring per mating season and no natural enemies. Add ravenous creatures (Homo sapiens included) into their safe mircosphere and diaster was assured.

Pinto-Correia traces the few captive dodos in Euorpe and the fates of their remains. Now, the only things the modern world has of the dodo are a scattering of bones, some paintings and sketches and the cultural understanding that to be a dodo is to be doomed.

A must read for the natural history reader or devotee.

Rating:
Summary: extinct in less than a century!
Review: Subtitle of this book is "The Sad, Strange Tale of the Dodo" and so it is. Pinto-Correia mixes a bit of humor with a pleasant writing style, lots of relevant history and geography, and a sad shake of her head about how rapacious humans are.

It was a marvelously heady period in Europe's awakening after intellectual dark days and Pinto-Correia gives the reader a sense of that emergence. On one level the dodo is a symbol of an eden found and lost on three small islands along the way to spices and riches. In their rush to gather spices, riches and glory men plundered these islands and left them poorer - the islands' inhabitants were decimated and became fearful, the men did not realize what a treasure they had found.

The reader can assign other levels to the story as Pinto-Correia unfolds it. Science came into its own during these centuries, and the dodo's discovery and extinction is a grand example of the days when alchemy gave way to chemistry and astrology became astronomy. Natural history developed as well, with taxonomy seemingly in the forefront. The dodo was classified and plunged into first one species then another, had little to prove that it even existed, finally was declared extinct - all in less than 100 years.

Pinto-Correia packs information about the hapless bird and the European humans of the era into this book. The reader learns painlessly while realizing this is a learning experience.

For this reader Return of the Crazy Bird is a grand vacation read, easy to pick up and put down without losing the thread of the story.

Rating:
Summary: extinct in less than a century!
Review: Subtitle of this book is "The Sad, Strange Tale of the Dodo" and so it is. Pinto-Correia mixes a bit of humor with a pleasant writing style, lots of relevant history and geography, and a sad shake of her head about how rapacious humans are.

It was a marvelously heady period in Europe's awakening after intellectual dark days and Pinto-Correia gives the reader a sense of that emergence. On one level the dodo is a symbol of an eden found and lost on three small islands along the way to spices and riches. In their rush to gather spices, riches and glory men plundered these islands and left them poorer - the islands' inhabitants were decimated and became fearful, the men did not realize what a treasure they had found.

The reader can assign other levels to the story as Pinto-Correia unfolds it. Science came into its own during these centuries, and the dodo's discovery and extinction is a grand example of the days when alchemy gave way to chemistry and astrology became astronomy. Natural history developed as well, with taxonomy seemingly in the forefront. The dodo was classified and plunged into first one species then another, had little to prove that it even existed, finally was declared extinct - all in less than 100 years.

Pinto-Correia packs information about the hapless bird and the European humans of the era into this book. The reader learns painlessly while realizing this is a learning experience.

For this reader Return of the Crazy Bird is a grand vacation read, easy to pick up and put down without losing the thread of the story.

Rating:
Summary: Mistaken notions
Review: This book pales having arrived just after E. Fuller's recent book "The Dodo from extinction to icon (UK)". From a scholarly vantage it fails utterly.

Firstly the book is quite parochial dwelling at great length on issues very distant from the dodo such as Portuguese navigation and ignoring the fact that the dodo was painted in India completely. The book makes extraordinary claims like "Why do we know so much about what the dodo looked like?" when the text itself makes clear we know very little and makes tremendous claims on behalf of R. Savery, a poor artist of animals and the history of western art - why?.

Most of the facts in the book such as the numbers of dodo's that arrived in Europe or how much contact R. Savery had with the dodo are either speculative or from doubtful sources. Though references are copious, some important references are not taken up and there is an over reliance on secondary sources. Much of the content it must be said is therefore presumptious.

There are some new translations such as descriptions by Clusius on the dodo's head, but there is little primary material of relevance in a critical style on the dodo itself.

As a celebration of the iconic place of the dodo and the history of the period and the Mascarenes this book has some claims, but you'd be better off reading Fuller. As there are so few good books on the Dodo I think this book is a reasonable start and the author has written it with enthusiasm.