By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — Jay Kirk was 9 the first time he visited the lifelike dioramas in the Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History.
"I was blown away," he says, by the animals "frozen forever in time." Then, as now, he found it easy to forget the panes of glass between him and the gorillas, lions and zebras.
But like many visitors, Kirk paid no attention to a plaque honoring Carl Akeley (1864-1926), a taxidermist and conservationist who not only envisioned the hall (in a feverish dream in Africa) but shot many of the animals, stuffed and preserved them.
At 40, Kirk is back at Akeley Hall, as the author of Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals (Holt, $27.50).
That man was Akeley. Kirk says that "long before Animal Planet or the BBC's Life series, his dioramas put us closer to nature, to see what we otherwise would not see."
Kirk stumbled on Akeley's name six years ago while writing an article for Harper's on inexplicable sightings of mountain lions in the East — "more sightings than Elvis," he quips — long after they had been wiped out.
What grabbed his interest was a mention of Akeley, a taxidermist from Upstate New York, who once "strangled a leopard with his bare hands."
With novelistic details, Kirk's book re-creates the adventures of a brooding genius who went big-game hunting with Theodore Roosevelt and invented a new camera that revolutionized field photography and film.
After nearly being killed by an elephant on Mount Kenya, Akeley dreamed of what would become Akeley Hall: a "monumental nave-like space" with exhibits behind glass panes, "each the size of a motion-picture screen."
Today, 28 dioramas are displayed on two floors encircling a 35-foot-high atrium anchored by eight elephants, including one bagged by Akeley's wife, Micki. The herd appears ready to stampede through the museum's Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda out into Central Park.
In the hall, Kirk likes to eavesdrop, "especially on kids whose comments tend to be an inquisition along the lines of: 'Am I looking at something dead or not dead?' Maybe that's why the whole vampire thing is so popular — because in a sense they are undead."
Kirk, who teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania, also found a moral: "All interesting characters are ultimately paradoxical, and Akeley was nothing if not a paradox. Here's a man charged with the work of killing animals to preserve a few examples of what were thought to be species on the verge of extinction."
But in 1921, after an epiphany while hunting in the Congo, Akeley helped create a sanctuary for gorillas, where Dian Fossey would do groundbreaking research.
