Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Techno Logy

by Lawrence Weschler

Book Overview

Finalist for Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit--some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century wonder cabinets that were the first museums and compels readers...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679764895
• ISBN13: 9780679764892
• Release Date: November 1996
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A thrilling intellectual odyssey

Weschler's animated look at the 'asthetically just' museum curator David Wilson and an examination, in the book's second part, of the history of 'Wonder-cabinets' from the sixteenth century to the present day is a fascinating mix of profile, historical inquiry, and detective story. David Wilson and his museum are almost too good to be true and should encourage anyone who can get to Los Angeles to visit the MJT. The prose throughout is superb: Weschler is a master at making people talk on the page, and his own thoughts are conveyed in a prose that mimics colloquial speech -- a murderously difficult thing to do. I have read all of Weschler's books, and this, I think, is his very best.

Quite simply one of the best books I've ever read

I can't praise this book highly enough; I second everything in the foregoing reader comments. The book manages to pull off an awesome coup, explaining Mr. Wilson's work without demystifying it, and emotionally paralleling the author's own discovery process with the reader's. A unique and wonderful book, not least because while it's an enlightening and frequently hilarious read, even as it keeps you entertained, it subtly, unpretentiously, and subversively changes the way you look at the world. I'm giving it five stars; I wish I could give a hundred times as many.

A wonderful book, highly recommended.

This is a wonderful book. It's beautifully written and captures perfectly the spirit of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. By the way, the Museum is real -- I've been there. I wandered in not knowing what it was and was immediately hooked. Having read this book, I like the Museum even more. David Wilson is a national treasure.One recommendation to anyone lucky enough to read this book: don't flip through and look at the pictures first. Read it from beginning to end as it was intended, or you'll ruin the story.

A new way to view museums

What is a museum? Are the things we see in a museum "the truth", and how did they come to be so? These questions and others fill Lawrence Weschler's marvelous extended essay, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder. Weschler takes as his jumping-off point the very real "Museum of Jurassic Technology," privately owned and operated in Los Angeles by David Wilson. In this book, Wechsler tells how European museums began as private collections of "wonder-ful" objects, with the focus less on whether the object was "true" than whether it evoked amazement. Many of the objects in Wilson's "Museum" appear real, and are described in the dry, precise prose known to museum viewers around the world. But they are not real. Or are they? This short (168 pages, with endnotes) book examines both the "wonders" of Wilson's storefront museum and the even more astounding wonders of the real world in gifted and sprightly prose. Not to be missed!!

This one stays with you a LONG time.

I can't think of another book that has so altered my perception of how we process new information in a world full of unexpected and remarkable scientific "wonders." Are we easily duped? Are we natural non-believers or natural believers? Weschler really gets us going about objects found in the "Museum of Jurassic Technology" in L.A., then suddenly we're caught short - is the Director of the Museum kidding Weschler, just to prove a point about how gullible we are? Is WESCHLER making it all up? Is this book itself a curio from a "cabinet of wonder" and are we being asked to accept it as non-fiction? Does the Museum exist? (I even tried to find it in the L.A. phone book when I visited - couldn't find it. Curiouser and curiouser....does anyone out there know for sure?) This book made me want to go sit in on graduate-level classes in Museology - how do museum professionals really decide what information will go on those little cards next to the e! xhibits in museums? How easily convinced are we by the authority of those stark, compact little "explanations" that what we are seeing is what they tell us we are seeing - especially in situations where we have very little ability to check out the infomation? Can we believe the unbelievable? Should we? How do museums - how does anyone, really - manipulate the way information is delivered to the uninformed or the unconvinced? Weschler keeps his readers wonderfully off-balance about what he's describing - we are often half-way to believing impossible information because that information comes wrapped up with the bows & ribbons of an exclusive academic vocabulary. Weschler brings in the phenomena of "cabinets of wonder", brought back from the New World to the Old, full of objects which we know now to be real but which seemed marvelous and almost surreal at the time. This whole book is like a trip through a carnival House of Mirrors - you're just never quit! e sure that what you're seeing is real. Delightful and thou! ght-provoking in absolutely every way. And it's short to boot - no excuse not to sit right down and read it. Then read it again because you were so perplexed the first time through. Then give a copy to a friend.