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The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums
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About The Museum Of Whales You Will Never See: And Other
Product Description “Filled with charming illustrations, this delightful book about Iceland’s 265 museums is as quirky and mesmerizing as the country’s dreamscape itself.” —ForbesMythic creatures, natural wonders, and the mysterious human impulse to collect are on beguiling display in this poetic tribute to the museums of an otherworldly island nation. Iceland is home to only 330,000 people (roughly the population of Lexington, Kentucky) but more than 265 museums and public collections--nearly one for every ten people. They range from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: How to display what can't be seen? In The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, A. Kendra Greene is our wise and whimsical guide through this cabinet of curiosities, showing us, in dreamlike anecdotes and more than thirty charming illustrations, how a seemingly random assortment of objects--a stuffed whooper swan, a rubber boot, a shard of obsidian, a chastity belt for rams--can map a people's past and future, their fears and obsessions. "The world is chockablock with untold wonders," she writes, "there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open." Review A Financial Times Best Book of the YearOne of Slate’s Ten Best Books of the YearOne of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best Books About Travel of the Year “I think one of the reasons I loved it so much is that, look, armchair travel is all we’re gonna get this summer, right? And here we’re following this author, who’s a really nice writer, all around an island, visiting dozens and dozens of these tiny, quirky museums that dot the island. I came away just with a real feeling for the place. . . . It really is a wonderful, wonderful little book.” —Tina Jordan, deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review, on WNYC’s All of It “Unseen treasures are hidden in the corners of Iceland—and inside this book. Glittering with whimsy and speckled with small drawings, The Museum of Whales provides a much-needed detour to a place most of us won’t ever get to see.” —Newsweek “Lyrical and offbeat . . . Greene is adept at extrapolating meaning from oddities and a sense of wonder from the family histories contained within the walls of small museums. . . . What Greene’s book achieves most of all is revealing the passions and the obsessions of the people behind the museums we so love to visit.” — The New York Times “This lyrical book is half travel guide, half inquiry into the joy of collecting—and a true original.” ―Dan Kois, Slate “Delightful . . . Fascinating . . . Dreamy and disorienting in the best way . . . Greene is a deft and skillful writer. . . . [She] makes for a charming guide, a literary traveler in the spirit of Bruce Chatwin.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “An engaging travelogue . . . A museum of museums . . . A provocation to reflect upon the essential nature of the museum, an inquiry that feels exceptionally pertinent as museums around the world try to define what they do in this moment of isolation . . . Greene’s enthusiastic prose would guide any visitors to Iceland well.” —The Dallas Morning News “As much a fanciful literary experiment as a sober-minded overview of the Icelandic museum scene. Its delightful eccentricities . . . deliver a ton of solid information on Icelandic history and the Icelandic spirit. . . . Greene’s heady, lyrical, elliptical prose digs deep into the human urge to collect things. The book also delivers deep formal pleasures.” —The Boston Globe “Delightful . . . Exuberant, idiosyncratic . . . With each chapter Greene circles around her subject as if viewing it in a vitrine, approaching it from different angles, changing her register and voice. The book is shot through with glee and irreverence.” ―The Guardian “Ca
