Dive into Vanishing Treasures, by Katherine Rundell, exploring the delicate balance between cultural heritage and the rapid changes of our modern world.
You won’t want to miss this LitStack Review by Lewis Buzbee.
Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
ISBN: 9780385550826
In This Review of Vanishing Treasures
Myth and History and Science
There are any number of books these days that wish to warn us of the depredations humans are raining on the natural world. Many of them are very good, concretely based in science and passionately written, and all of them are earnest in their appeals. But the question remains: Is simply knowing about climate change and habitat loss enough? In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer recounts a woman coming up to her after a reading and insisting that people just needed to know what was happening, that humans were imperiling the world. But we do know, Kimmerer insists, and we do. So, what can one more book on the subject do for us in our despair?
Vanishing Treasures is a bestiary (a dictionary of animals, if you will) that showcases 23 different species, each of which is “extraordinary” in some way, and all of them “endangered.” The animals range from the less familiar—Greenland Shark, Pangolin, Golden Mole—to the more commonplace—Spider, Bat, Tuna. The final entry in the bestiary is Human, for we are also extraordinary and endangered. In each of the short entries—3 to 5 pages—Katherine Rundell braids three threads around each creature. There are descriptions of the myths and less scientific observations humans have dreamed up, then there are clear scientific facts about that creature, and finally, startling evidence of how desperately that creature is endangered and the causes of that endangerment.
Rundell’s goal is to make the reader not only understand that loss is happening but to make us appreciate what exactly is being lost. She wants us to know these animals intimately and to stand in awe of them, and to provoke a visceral reaction in the reader, a deeply profound reaction.
Leopard Spots and Legless Birds
Rundell has an agile and capacious mind, one that brings together her deep research in unusual ways.
We learn, for instance, that the giraffe was for centuries considered a hybrid monster. One writer said the giraffe was the result of a panther mating with a camel mare—camel legs? leopard spots? Another supposed it must be a combination of leopard, buffalo, hart, and camel—without specifying how that might be accomplished. More objectively, we learn, the giraffe can run 35 miles per hour, and that 94% of giraffe sexual coupling is homosexual. Then we learn that the U.S. is one of the largest markets for “giraffe parts,” and that in a recent decade, American hunters killed 3,744 giraffes, some 5% of the those still alive in the wild.
Rundell goes on. The Swift was once thought to have no legs or feet, it spent so much of its life in flight. The Golden Vole’s fur is iridescent, the only mammal with this quality, even though it lives completely underground and is effectively blind. Because of the eradication of hedgerows in the U.K., many of them centuries old, the Hedgehog population there has fallen from 30 million to 1 million since the 1950s.
Preaching to the Choir
We are a part of nature, of course, but Vanishing Treasures make this point in a novel way: Humans have had relations with these animals since we began to tell stories, we have studied them and found them beautiful and unique, and yet our greed—it all comes down to greed in one form or another—has led us to willfully destroy entire species, and to continue to do so. This is the spry and profound effect of the bestiary; Rundell returns us to wonder, and in so doing, moves us to a new sense of what we are losing. Not just so much loss, but the loss of so many individuals.
Still, the question remains: What can we do? Rundell offers a concise, meaningful, and highly individual plan for countering these losses—fly less, eat less meat, etc.–though we remain skeptical the problem is so vast. To counter our helplessness, she offers a quote from Wendell Berry: “Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”
Is Rundell preaching to the choir? Yes, she is, because sometimes the choir needs preaching to, if only to remember why it is we sing in the first place.
On the Beauty of the Book as Object
It’s something of a shame that in book reviews we rarely talk about the beauty of a particular book as object. Vanishing Treasures is a marvelous piece of trade publishing. The cover, yes, seductive, with embossing and spot gloss, and a charming drawing of a wombat. But the interior makes the book stand out among others, and adds, I think, to our involvement in the text, the sense of wonder awakened not only by the word but by the pages that embody the words. Each entry in the bestiary is forwarded by a realistic but nonetheless moving illustration of that animal, a single creature, in gray tones, against a golden background; the illustrations by Talya Baldwin are both intimate and melancholy at once. Each entry leads with a Small Capped phrase in the book’s gold ink. It’s a beauty to hold and to read. Wonder happens everywhere, it seems.
~ Lewis Buzbee
About Katherine Rundell, Author of Vanishing Treasures
Katherine Rundell is the author of Impossible Creatures, The Explorer, The Good Thieves, and others. She grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London, and is currently a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She begins each day with a cartwheel and believes that reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless. In her spare time, she enjoys walking on tightropes and trespassing on the rooftops of Oxford colleges.
Other Titles by Katherine Rundell
About Lewis Buzbee
Lewis Buzbee is the author of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop and many others, including 3 award-winning novels for younger readers. His new novel, Diver, will be published in March, 2025.
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