“One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.” (Christian Science Monitor)
This is one weird-but-true story. It’s a story that leads readers from 19th century scientific expeditions into the jungles of Malaysia to the “feather fever” of the turn of the last century, when women’s hats were be-plumed with ostriches and egrets. And it’s a story that focuses on the feather-dependent Victorian art of salmon fly-tying and its present-day practitioners, many of whom lurk online in something called “The Feather Underground.”
By the end of Kirk Wallace Johnson’s absorbing book, The Feather Thief, we readers learn more than we probably ever wanted to know about feathers. But, we may also come to understand why it’s important, ecologically speaking, to care about what happened to the feathers of what Johnson calls, “the missing birds of Tring.”
