Dreambirds: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food and Fortune

An unusual combination of science, history, and memoir built around ostrich farming, primarily in South Africa. This may not sound like an exciting topic on its face, but Nixon's book is a model of how to write creative non-fiction.

This book is wonderful. It took me to places and times I never would have thought of to go. From Ladysmith (I knew Ladysmith Black Mombasa) to Austrilia. The life and times of things I knew nothing about. What a trip. Well worth reading if your interested in learning.

You don't need to know much more than the biological name of the common ostrich to know that this is a weird bird. Sparrow camel!, what is that? Obviously the ornithologists who discovered the bird were confused about it; as confused, perhaps as the ostrich sometimes looks with it's blank, non-blinking stare. Have you ever seen one up close? The term 'bird brain' is appropriate. This is all rather unkind, and in fact, unfair to the ostrich. A bird rumored to be so dumb that it supposedly sticks it's head into the sand when threatened; actually we are the dummies if we believe this bit of folklore - it's a myth. The ostrich is in fact remarkably well adapted to it's environment - the savannas of Eastern and Southern Africa, and has had a close association with man for the better part of a century, providing us with food and making fortunes for us.It is this relationship between man and ostrich that Mr Nixon explores in DREAMBIRDS, specifically his remembrances of the bird from his childhood in South Africa. A town called Oudtshoorn, near where he grew up, was, before WWI, the capital of the worldwide ostrich feather industry. In its heyday it supplied 100,000 tons of plumes to the fashion centers of Europe. The town was then known as the Jerusalem of Africa - a consequence of the large resident community of jewish feather merchants. That's about all the history there is though. The book is a more a biography, and the ostrich is the common theme, the link between Nixons early youth in South Africa and his adult life in his adopted home - the US. We run into the bird at the ostrich races in Chandler, Arizona and again at various ranches throughout the Southwest. It's not only places, but people that are mentioned. There are some interesting characters involved in the ostrich business. One of the central people in the book is Mr Nixons father, and we are treated to a bit of reminiscing about the relationship between father and son. DREAMBIRDS is a well written and humorous look at this "gawky, boneheaded creature"; gladly it's light on the father and son dynamic, but sadly it's also light on the development and history of the industry. For lovers of birds and biographies.

Rob Nixon's Dreambirds is the journey reminiscent of perhaps our finest writers today--of Naipaul, Rushdie, W.B Sebald and others--, exiles who float between past and present, continent to continent, yet writing as if they have never truly left the childhood landscapes lost to them in the political, cultural and economic upheavals of the modern world. Written in a meditative and at times even dreamlike prose, Nixon introduces us to his family, like him, keen observers of the natural world of South Africa, which becomes for them a means to identify with a land and culture far removed from their Northern European roots. Nixon's memoir is held together by the story of the ostrich, the dreambird, which attracted flocks of pioneers to South Africa's Karoo desert region hoping to make their fortunes on the feathers of this mysterious remnant from prehistoric times. As Nixon tells the story of South Africa's pioneers who banked their dreams on the plumes of the ostrich, we not only learn of the fascinating natural history of the ostrich, but of Nixon's own affection for a world he could never quite feel at home in but savors nevertheless. The politics of South Africa are of course never too far away from Nixon's meditations on how his family and his life were shaped by the ostrich boon. In his restrained prose, one feels the ever present weight of South Africa's troubled double world of black and white, a world Nixon knows he can never escape. This consciousness of the racial divide of his people seeps into nearly every encounter and story, and it's Nixon's gift that he never has to directly speak about what it must feel like to carry the weight of remorse of South Africa's colonial past. He doesn't have to because it is obvious in the choices he makes to weave into his narrative the stories of ostrich ranchers and political activists which he goes to great lengths to balance with that of his own poetic self-examination. The narrative takes one more turn when Nixon moves to America, a place more like South Africa than Americans would like to believe according to Nixon. Here he hopes to put behind him the conflicted emotions surrounding his homeland and the memories of the delicate desert landscape of his youth. After living for a few years in New York, a place Nixon describes as ironically forgiving for emigrants like him, he takes a trip to Arizona to do some travel writing and discovers to his surprise the similarities of the Sonoran Desert to that of his Karoo. There too Nixon finds that the pioneer spirit of the American West is alive and well and not all that different from that of what he remembers from back home. And once again, in flies or rather runs the dreambird, the ostrich, but no longer raised for its flamboyant feathers for fashionable women, but to be fattened, fired over the grill and fed to health-conscious Americans. The get-rich schemes of his ancestors h

In "Dreambirds," Rob Nixon begins with a memory of a particular (omnivorous, as it happens) ostrich of his childhood, then explores the surprisingly pervasive role of ostriches in his personal history, in the settlement of his hometown and nearby "feather boomtowns," and finally in the new American West, where ranchers value ostrich hide and meat in place of plumes. His journeys lead him to provocative considerations of settlement and exile, from the nineteenth-century Lithuanian Jews who were lured to Africa as feather prospectors to an American couple who left Illinois to make rattlesnake crafts in the Arizona desert. Most compelling, however, is Nixon's candid look at the migrations in his own family history and his troubled relationship with his homeland. With a flair for anecdote and a mix of humor and compassion, he inhabits his childhood self as vividly as he inhabits the dramatic landscape of the South African desert--and in so doing, transforms both worlds from foreign to familiar. Rob Nixon's book is an inspiration to the memoirist who envisions a place for his or her story in the global currents of history and migration; it is equally an inspiration to the scholar who pursues in print that elusive, fruitful union between the political and the personal, between researched fact and fantasy.