Volume 39, Number 20 · December 3, 1992
Design for Living
By Thomas R. Edwards
Natural History
by Maureen Howard
Norton, 393 pp., $22.95
Anyone who loves natural history museums knows that the first moment we enter one, particularly as children, we understand that the collections are not the main point; they are for soberer minds. The point is the dioramas, those magical windows opening on times and places we will never actually visit. And the best dioramas, for our purposes, include not just simulacra of animals and plants but also the human forms posed among them, as if delicately alluding to the human artifice that puts dioramas in natural history museums. We are looking to see not so much nature and its history as ourselves in nature and history, and the nearer the figures come to 'life size' the better they please.
Review, 2768 words
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