Butterfly People

Starred review from January 21, 2013
National Book Award–finalist and Columbia University historian Leach (Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture) offers a mesmerizing and comprehensive history of butterfly collection in America, and this pastime’s relation to the nation’s landscape, ideologies, and industry. The individuals profiled—including William Henry Edwards, Samuel Scudder, Herman Strecker, Augustus Grote—are men grappling with the great ideas of the modern age: evolution, the expansion of the industrial age, and the rise of the market economy, humans’ relationship with nature, and beauty. This is a deep dive into what, at first glance, seems an esoteric subject, but after further perusal reveals itself as an essential component of this nation’s intellectual history. Fully informative on all things lepidoptera, this work embodies that 19th-century synthesis of science and art, while staying firmly grounded as a history of its namesake, as the Butterfly People become as rare as their most highly prized specimens. It is not just Edwards who “carried within him the tension at the heart of the American experience, from the colonial period onward, between extraction and adoration, artifactual beauty and natural beauty, commerce and science,” for Leach asks the reader to consider all these things as well—their loss and triumph—and what might be gained in the reflection. Agent: Georges Borchardt, the Georges Borchardt Literary Agency.

February 1, 2013
An expansive historical account of the 19th-century figures whose enthusiasm and perseverance shaped natural history studies on butterflies. Leach (History/Columbia Univ.; Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life, 1999, etc.) meticulously examines butterfly collecting, once a pastime enjoyed across social strata and once viewed as a means for bridging art and science. He presents an appealing if controversial view of collecting as a direct appreciation of and engagement with nature's beauty, while also acknowledging that it sometimes turned into a competitive expression of man's dominion, resulting in harsh consequences and strife in relationships between collectors. Through portraits of William Henry Edwards (a West Virginian entomologist known for his voyage to the Amazon), Herman Strecker (a collector, author and illustrator), Augustus Grote (director of the Buffalo Museum of Natural Sciences), William Doherty (entomologist and tropical collector), Samuel Scudder (entomologist and paleontologist) and William Holland (director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh), Leach details conflicts in the field during the mid- to late-1800s, including concerns over the destruction of natural resources; the ethics of killing, selling and trading butterflies; debates on systematics, taxonomy, naming and considerations of butterfly habitats; creationist vs. Darwinist views; and the line between advancement of science and selfish amassment. The book's closing chapters on dealings between butterfly men in the Gilded Age is especially fascinating. For general readers, the esoteric minutia may overwhelm. For naturalists and butterfly buffs, however, this is an unusual, pinpointed slice of American life enlivened with fragments of correspondence and reproductions of plates from classic books of the period.

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Starred review from April 1, 2013
Historian Leach (Country of Exiles, 1999) was wild for butterflies as a boy, and he now turns his exuberant joy in their winged beauty into a unique celebration of nineteenth-century American butterfly fanatics. Naturalism was all the rage, fueled by Darwin's discoveries, and butterfly people collected, bred, and studied vast numbers of the resplendent butterfly species that then flourished on the land's agrarian tapestry. With scintillating precision and original, paradigm-shifting interpretation, Leach tells the intriguing, delvingly researched life stories of such lepidopterological trailblazers as William Henry Edwards, a coal-mine manager who wrote the landmark, three-volume Butterflies of North America, and stone carver Herman Strecker, whose father tried to beat his youthful obsession with butterflies out of him but who persisted and amassed America's largest butterfly collection, now housed at the Field Museum in Chicago. Leach astutely considers how pursuing butterflies placed people inside the fullness of nature, engendering crucial ecological understanding, even as escalating industrialization caused environmental destruction. Replete with forays into the creation of butterfly guidebooks and art, the mania for exotic specimens, and a history of the butterfly net, Leach's astute and exciting inquiry into a time of heightened awareness of the beauty of the world, in both its natural and its artificial forms, delivers new understanding of our past and present.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)