The Medici Giraffe and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power by Marina Belozerskaya

 

I bought this like ten years ago, back when I was SUPER obsessed with nonfiction. I still like nonfiction but now it feels like a chore to read and I have to be in the mood for it, unless it's a memoir or one of those really poppy books about science. 

THE MEDICI GIRAFFE is a book that sets out to explore how animals have, historically, been used as displays of power. It starts out with Alexander the Great's fascination with elephants and their potential for use in his armies and ends with William Randolph Hearst's private zoo, plus an epilogue that sort of skirts around China's use of pandas in global diplomacy.

This book's biggest flaw is that the topics are not cohesive. Apart from the chapters being about rich, powerful people who kept animals (or slaves-- more on that in a mo'), the people they talk about are pretty different and it didn't feel like there was a unifying theme.

So here are some bulleted thoughts.

Alexander the Great's chapter was one of the best because I loved the idea of this dude creating a two hundred strong herd of elephants that he then couldn't be fucked to train. Elephants scared horses and also men, so the armies that had them, had to have handlers who got the horses used to them and were adept at managing the elephants. But Alexander had so much conquering to do that he didn't take the time. They were basically useless. The Ptolemaic dynasty kind of feels anticlimactic after the elephant hilarity, but I did get a kick out of Ptolemy's younger son literally having a name that means sister-fucker because he married his sister. Loooooool. The Greeks apparently hated that and thought that was super gross (lots of gossip about "unholy holes"). I think he's also the guy who put statues of his mistresses everywhere. HILARIOUS. I love that kind of gossip.

Did not care at all about the Roman chapter that followed. Booooring.

Lorenzo de Medici's chapter was mildly interesting. Basically, he was like "fuck you, I'm a Medici, I own a giraffe." 

There was a guy from Europe who owned a lion named Rudolph but apparently lions weren't as cool. I wished the side note about the Chinese emperor who told people to stop giving him lions as presents because he had too many was the main chapter. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in ancient China when the emperor was telling everyone that lions are totally last season, you guys. 11/10 would watch.

Josephine Bonaparte was apparently a crazy bird lady. She had so many birds. She had a lot of other animals too but then Napoleon got pissed off and told her to cut it out. The fact that she cheated on her asshole husband and had a ton of spite-birds made me like her more than I already did. After Alexander the Great's chapter, Josephine and her black swan army was the best chapter.

William Randolph Hearst's chapter was weird. The tone almost felt fangirly in parts but this guy was not a nice person. Also, his zoo animals seemed to be pretty badly treated, so that made me sad. I don't want to read about how he didn't listen to the zoo employee he hired to evaluate the health and comfort of his diseased and anxious animals (spoiler: he wasn't sliving for protection against animal cruelty) or how zoo visitors and zoo EMPLOYEES tortured the animals for fun. The only thing about this chapter that I liked was the fact that Charlie Chaplin apparently got a goofy grin while looking at zoos. YES.

The chapter that made me most uncomfy, however, was the "Human Animals" chapter, which was about Hernan Cortez and his colonization of indigenous Mexicans. I don't know, guys, something about writing about human slavery and sticking it in a chapter in a book about animals being used for power gives me the ick. Cortez was an asshole. The only good thing about this chapter was that it made me want to rewatch The Road to El Dorado, which is an excellent movie.

The epilogue about China's panda diplomacy was OK. Vox has a video about it which is way better. I don't think we like pandas because they remind us of ourselves. I think we like pandas because they look like black and white teddy bears who eat leaves.

Overall, this book was OK. I'm not going to keep it but I learned a lot of interesting things that I never learned in my history classes back in school. BRB, adding Road to El Dorado to my watch queue.

3 out of 5 stars