Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party

 

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures & Accidentally Upended the World- Edward Dolnick

Scribner

Rating: 📚📚

Synopsis: In the early 1800s the world was a safe and cozy place. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled upon a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, Victorians unearthed enormous bones—bones that reached as high as a man’s head. 

Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had imagined that creatures like three-toed giants once lumbered across the land. And if anyone conjured up such a scene, they would never imagine that all those animals could have vanished hundreds of millions years ago. The thought of sudden, arbitrary disappearance from life was unnerving and forced the Victorians to rethink everything they knew about the world. Celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads readers through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today.

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If you're looking for a carefully explained, well-thoughtout, and logical, chronological explanation of how the Victorians accidentally created paleontology, discovered dinosaurs, and rethought everything they knew about the world- this is not that book.

If you're just interested enough in the idea of discovering dinosaurs where the world had never acknowledged them before, and wondering how Victorian science dealt with that, where any book is a good starter, then Dolnick is probably as good a start as any.

I am by no means an expert on dinosaurs. But I'm a huge reader of everything related to Victorian history and hadn't come across a book devoted to describing the fossil craze of the Victorian period and how it changed the scientific thought process. So the title hooked me. From Mary Anning to William Buckland to Richard Owen, this book introduces you to the English (and one or two French) who thrilled in hunting fossils or those happier in museums trying to understand fossils. It explains the original Victorian view that nature, science, and religion all fit happily together. Fossils and the startling idea of dinosaurs began to erode those views, despite how hard a few clung to them. Before Darwin threw his new explanation of evolution onto the scene, people were already prepared for the change in thinking he was suggesting.

My problem wasn't the more simplistic approach Dolnick took in his explanations or way of writing. Everyone has their own style and the reader can get used to it if the story is good. Or the number of times he would lament about how if only those early scientists had had access to the kinds of equipment etc. that modern scientists have. Which seemed like kind of the point to me. When you're discovering something, you work with what you have. It was the unbelieveable amount of repetition in the book. Read a chapter and then had to take a break for a few days? No problem, you could read the next one and not have missed anything. Different words, saying exactly the same thing. It was like he couldn't figure out what version of a chapter he liked better, so he just left them all in. Occasionally new things would come in, a new person would be introduced, etc. Then they would get the same repeat treatment, hammering away at the reader until I had to skim sections to be able to move forward at all. By the time we got to the famous dinner party in the Crystal Palace dinosaur statues I was pretty numb to all of it.  

Overall, a fantastic idea for a research idea and book, very poorly and repetitiously executed. Definitely made me not want to pick up another book by this author, but did make me interested enough to look through his biblioghraphy to see if anyone had done a better job of writing on the subject.

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review