cover image Mr. Hornaday’s War: How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife That Changed the World

Mr. Hornaday’s War: How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife That Changed the World

Stefan Bechtel. Beacon, $27.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8070-0635-1

This brief, entertaining biography by Bechtel (a founding editor of Men’s Health and author of Tornado Hunter) traces William Hornaday’s (1854–1937) journey from big game hunter (he killed 43 orangutans in Borneo as a young man) to defender of wildlife, and his emergence as one of the 19th century’s most famous conservationists. Founder and first director of Washington, D.C.’s National Zoo, and first director of the Bronx Zoo, Hornaday’s life was riddled with paradox. For example, he is sometimes credited with singlehandedly saving the American buffalo. Once the most ubiquitous creature on the continent, the bison had been hunted to the brink of extinction, and in 1886, Hornaday had reason to believe that the “buffalo-hide hunters of the United States had practically finished their work.” In response, he organized his own buffalo hunt, with the goal of collecting specimens to taxidermy and display in the Smithsonian, “allowing people to see, up close, what he was asking them to save.” Though clearly fond of his subject, Bechtel does not gloss over Hornaday’s faults—such as the troubling incident in which Hornaday displayed a Congolese pygmy at the Bronx Zoo—and the resulting book offers a lively treatment of a singular life. Agent: Don Fehr, Trident Media Group. (May)