Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews

A few of the mounts were a little gory — a deer with a mailbox impaled on an antler, another festooned with barbed wire, and one with an arrow stuck in its brisket — and one display, a coyote whose torso was split open to reveal a miniature scene of the destruction of the World Trade Center, complete with little firemen and rubble piles, was surpassingly weird. Otherwise, the room was Biblically tranquil, the lion at last lying down with the Corsican lamb, the family of jackdaws in everlasting, unrequited pursuit of a big green beetle, and the stillborn Bengal-tiger cub magically revived, its face in an eternal snarl, alive-looking although it had never lived.