The Feather Thief book pdf download for free or read online, also The Feather Thief pdf was written by Kirk Wallace Johnson.
KIRK WALLACE JOHNSON is the author of The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. His 2013 memoir To Be a Friend is Fatal: the Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind covers his work coordinating the reconstruction of Fallujah and his subsequent efforts on behalf of Iraqi refugees as founder of the List project to resettle Iraqi allies.
His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, among others, and his work has been featured on This American Life, 60 Minutes, The Today Show, and The List, a feature-length documentary premiering at the TriBeCa Film Festival.
| Book | The Feather Thief |
| Author | Kirk Wallace Johnson |
| Language | English |
| Size | 16.1 MB |
| Pages | 336 |
| Category | Novel |
The Feather Thief Book PDF download for free
On a cold afternoon in June 2009, twenty-year-old American flutist Edwin Rist boarded a train to a suburb of the British Museum of Natural History after a concert at London’s Royal Academy of Music.
The Tring Museum houses one of the world’s largest ornithological collections and was filled with rare specimens of birds whose magnificent feathers were worth untold sums of money to men who shared Edwin’s passion: the Victorian art of salmon fly tying.
Once in the museum, the fly-tying champion snatched hundreds of bird skins, some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, who risked everything to collect them, and escaped into the dark.
Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist-deep in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the theft. He was very soon consumed by the very strange case of the feather thief.
What would a person own to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid for the price of his crime? What happened to the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson found himself catapulted into a year-long global investigation. A gripping tale of bizarre and shocking crime and one man’s relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a riveting exploration of man’s obsession and destructive instinct to harvest nature’s beauty.
The Feather Thief Book Pdf Download
This is an incredible true story about the struggles a man faces to satisfy an obsession. The reader is introduced to the world of fly tying, the art of making intricate fishing lures out of bird feathers. What is remarkable about this activity is that there is a subset of these levels that collect extremely rare and valuable bird feathers and pay exorbitant prices for the more exotic ones. Edwin Rist is an accomplished music student and avid aviator who steals hundreds of rare birds from the British Museum in 2009.
The Feather Thief book is a study in obsession as the author himself, an Iraqi war veteran, becomes obsessed with the crime and the man who committed it. The story is immersive. Johnson, the author, has spent an invaluable amount of time researching the history of fly tying and the allure of exotic feathers to the point of secretly attending a fly tying conference. He becomes the lead investigator to unravel the details of Edwin’s crimes, identify accomplices, and track bird skins.
The book piqued my interest from the first pages. Johnson’s book has the pace of a well-done whodunit and manages to keep the suspense of exactly what happened and who was involved throughout the book. Cover this story with all the zeal of a professional investigative journalist. He would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys psychological character studies and true crime.
When I come to the end of a book that has absolutely captivated me, the same thing always happens. My body is full of anticipation of how this is going to end: I want to read fast to find out, but I force myself to read slowly. I’m nervous when I start the last paragraph and when it ends I feel a little excited. By the time you get to the end of The Feather Thief, you can paint all of the above by a factor of 100.
It tells the story of how musical prodigy Edwin Rist ended up stealing nearly 300 bird skins from the Natural History Museum. This is not a random thief. This is a bright, intelligent, charismatic and talented boy from New York who is studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London when he formulated his plan to steal the birds. They were part of a collection that had been assembled over a period of around 350 years and were priceless in terms of their replacement value. Rist wanted the feathers (rare, hard to find, and expensive if you could) from the birds to tie salmon flies and sell them to other species of salmon to do the same.
Kirk Wallace Johnson put this book together over a number of years and it shows. The level of research is scientific down to the last detail. He does an admirable job of writing an incredibly unusual crime story with some equally unusual twists as he interviews some obsessive and mysterious people. He is clearly a stubborn person, which makes one wonder if a book like this would have seen the light of day if he himself hadn’t listened and been interested in the story.
If a writer had dreamed up this story, he would have considered it too imaginative and far-fetched for people to believe. This is really a strange story, very well told. I would highly recommend that you read this book.
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