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Rob Nixon's DREAMBIRDS at first seems fairly obscure --- on the cover a pair of
ornery-looking, long-eyelashed birds stare us down, and a subtitle reads "The Strange
History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune." It is, indeed, a book about
ostriches, in the vein of such recent micro-histories as Mark Kurlansky's COD: A Biography
of the Fish That Changed the World (1998) or Larry Zuckerman's THE POTATO: How the Humble
Spud Rescued the Western World (1999). But, like the best nonfiction, Nixon's book
profiles small and rather bizarre corners of the world --- the ostrich ranchers of South
Africa and their latter-day counterparts in the American Southwest --- while at the same
time managing to cover a lot of ground, including family and social histories, politics
and apartheid, ornithology and geography, and the dense and rich emotional landscape of
childhood.
Nixon, a professor of literature and an experienced journalist, takes us back to his
childhood in the Karoo, the South African desert that is home to thorny mimosa trees,
flowers that disguise themselves as stones, and of course, ostriches --- curious birds
identified by Carl von Linné, the taxonomist, as Struthio camelus, the
"sparrow-camel." An Arab folk tale relates that when ostriches were asked to say
whether they were birds or mammals, they could not choose and so were condemned by God to
live in the Karoo, one of the most unforgiving deserts on earth.
Growing up there, Nixon felt as if he was living on the far ends of the earth. "Books
were northern creatures that seemed to wing their way towards us from as far off as any
migrating bird. I could never find the world around me in the words I read." This
changes when his father gives him a copy of Albert Jackson's TRADER ON THE VELD. "I
never knew that a book could be crammed with so many things, so many places that I
knew."
With that, Nixon embarks on the fascinating story of Albert Jackson and men like him, Jews
who fled the pogroms in 19th century Eastern Europe for the "Jerusalem of
Africa," hoping to find their fortunes in gold, diamonds, or the ostrich trade. The
Jews and other European immigrants to South Africa were timely; the late Victorian age
witnessed the world's first ostrich boom, fueled by a craze for extravagance in which
ostrich plumes supplied height, lift, and a touch of the exotic to dresses, capes, fans,
and towering hats. For a few decades, ostrich plumes were worth more than gold, and the
"ostrich elite" lived like kings in feather palaces that collapsed like so many
castles in the sand with the advent of World War I and more somber fashions.
These ostrich ranchers are the book's first dreamers; we meet their counterparts at the
American Ostrich Association meeting, where talk of low-calorie "ratite" steaks,
fancy ostrich-hide cowboy boots, and $20,000 breeding pairs gives rise to ostrich-mania:
"You can't teach an ostrich to fly," intones one ostrich promoter. "But you
can succeed and find success for whatever heights you choose. The road is open, the
ladder's up and the sky's the limit. Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire,
sincerely believe and enthusiastically act upon must and will come to pass."
Rather than scoff at the folly of these would-be ostrich cowboys --- or poke fun at the
gawky, flightless birds themselves --- Nixon weaves a fascinating tale out of the birds,
characters, and places that he so clearly loves. In the desert landscape he unearths
strangely fascinating tales --- an aging white woman and her young black assistant who
build concrete statuary in the middle of the Karoo; an American couple who fled the city
for a life of rattlesnake trapping in the desert; the wintering cranes who perform mating
dances in an Arizona field. If anything, the book is loosely structured around the notion
of the past as a dream that never quite goes away; in all, it's an effortlessly written,
pleasingly anecdotal book --- perfect for birders and non-birders alike.
--- Reviewed by Martha Hostetter
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