Volume 55, Number 19 · December 4, 2008
The Spider Man and Other Stories
By Tim Flannery
Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum
by Richard Fortey
Knopf, 335 pp., $27.50
The Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London, is one of Britain's most popular public institutions, attracting nearly four million visitors per year. Despite the fact that some natural history museums have made efforts to publicize their research and collections,[1] most people have no idea at all what goes on inside them, and judging from Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, that's not altogether a bad thing. It's not that museums don't do important work. Indeed, with extinctions of species and other environmental damage increasing by the year, the research carried out in them is more vital than ever. It's just that the way they run, and the kinds of people who work in them, sometimes seem hopelessly ill-fitted to modern institutional models of management.
Review, 3429 words
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