Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder
Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology
by Lawrence Weschler
The recap
On an ordinary stretch of Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles sits a dim, hushed institution called the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Its displays include a bat said to pass through solid objects, an ant driven by a parasitic fungus, a woman who grew a horn, folk remedies involving mice on toast, and microscopic sculptures that fit inside the eye of a needle. Some exhibits sound plausible, others impossible, and the museum offers few clues about which is which. Lawrence Weschler, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, set out to understand the place and its soft-spoken co-founder, David Wilson, and soon found himself in libraries and archives, checking which marvels had a basis in fact. His inquiry widens into a history of the cabinets of curiosities kept by Renaissance collectors, the ancestors of modern museums, where facts and fables shared the same shelves. Short and playful, the book asks how we decide what to believe, and why a sense of wonder might matter more than certainty.
Why read it
For lovers of odd museums and cabinets of curiosities, and for anyone intrigued by the blurry border between fact and invention.
Fun facts
- 01
The book was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
- 02
David Wilson, who founded the museum in 1988 with Diana Drake Wilson, received a MacArthur Fellowship, often called the genius grant, in 2001.
- 03
Weschler was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1981 to 2002, moving between political reportage and cultural writing.
- 04
The book has two parts: 'Inhaling the Spore', which explores the museum itself, and 'Cerebral Growth', a wider look at historical wonder cabinets.
