Winter Book Club: The Feather Thief

Continuing with our theme of natural history and deception, this month's selection is Kirk Wallace Johnson's The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. Join us on Tuesday, March 31 to discuss this story that brings together the worlds of bird collecting and fly fishing. 

About the book: On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's…