Rating: 
Summary: Great Read, Great Fun!
Review: At first you might be wondering what is going on. Just keep reading and the reward will be yours. The narrator takes us on a path of journey. You will discover the new Wunderkammer in LA.
Rating:
Summary: Quite simply one of the best books I've ever read
Review: I can't praise this book highly enough; I second everything in the foregoing reader comments. The book manages to pull off an awesome coup, explaining Mr. Wilson's work without demystifying it, and emotionally paralleling the author's own discovery process with the reader's. A unique and wonderful book, not least because while it's an enlightening and frequently hilarious read, even as it keeps you entertained, it subtly, unpretentiously, and subversively changes the way you look at the world. I'm giving it five stars; I wish I could give a hundred times as many.
Rating:
Summary: This one stays with you a LONG time.
Review: I can't think of another book that has so altered my perception of how we process new information in a world full of unexpected and remarkable scientific "wonders." Are we easily duped? Are we natural non-believers or natural believers? Weschler really gets us going about objects found in the "Museum of Jurassic Technology" in L.A., then suddenly we're caught short - is the Director of the Museum kidding Weschler, just to prove a point about how gullible we are? Is WESCHLER making it all up? Is this book itself a curio from a "cabinet of wonder" and are we being asked to accept it as non-fiction? Does the Museum exist? (I even tried to find it in the L.A. phone book when I visited - couldn't find it. Curiouser and curiouser....does anyone out there know for sure?) This book made me want to go sit in on graduate-level classes in Museology - how do museum professionals really decide what information will go on those little cards next to the e! xhibits in museums? How easily convinced are we by the authority of those stark, compact little "explanations" that what we are seeing is what they tell us we are seeing - especially in situations where we have very little ability to check out the infomation? Can we believe the unbelievable? Should we? How do museums - how does anyone, really - manipulate the way information is delivered to the uninformed or the unconvinced? Weschler keeps his readers wonderfully off-balance about what he's describing - we are often half-way to believing impossible information because that information comes wrapped up with the bows & ribbons of an exclusive academic vocabulary. Weschler brings in the phenomena of "cabinets of wonder", brought back from the New World to the Old, full of objects which we know now to be real but which seemed marvelous and almost surreal at the time. This whole book is like a trip through a carnival House of Mirrors - you're just never quit! e sure that what you're seeing is real. Delightful and thou! ght-provoking in absolutely every way. And it's short to boot - no excuse not to sit right down and read it. Then read it again because you were so perplexed the first time through. Then give a copy to a friend.
Rating:
Summary: This one stays with you a LONG time.
Review: I can't think of another book that has so altered my perception of how we process new information in a world full of unexpected and remarkable scientific "wonders." Are we easily duped? Are we natural non-believers or natural believers? Weschler really gets us going about objects found in the "Museum of Jurassic Technology" in L.A., then suddenly we're caught short - is the Director of the Museum kidding Weschler, just to prove a point about how gullible we are? Is WESCHLER making it all up? Is this book itself a curio from a "cabinet of wonder" and are we being asked to accept it as non-fiction? Does the Museum exist? (I even tried to find it in the L.A. phone book when I visited - couldn't find it. Curiouser and curiouser....does anyone out there know for sure?) This book made me want to go sit in on graduate-level classes in Museology - how do museum professionals really decide what information will go on those little cards next to the e! xhibits in museums? How easily convinced are we by the authority of those stark, compact little "explanations" that what we are seeing is what they tell us we are seeing - especially in situations where we have very little ability to check out the infomation? Can we believe the unbelievable? Should we? How do museums - how does anyone, really - manipulate the way information is delivered to the uninformed or the unconvinced? Weschler keeps his readers wonderfully off-balance about what he's describing - we are often half-way to believing impossible information because that information comes wrapped up with the bows & ribbons of an exclusive academic vocabulary. Weschler brings in the phenomena of "cabinets of wonder", brought back from the New World to the Old, full of objects which we know now to be real but which seemed marvelous and almost surreal at the time. This whole book is like a trip through a carnival House of Mirrors - you're just never quit! e sure that what you're seeing is real. Delightful and thou! ght-provoking in absolutely every way. And it's short to boot - no excuse not to sit right down and read it. Then read it again because you were so perplexed the first time through. Then give a copy to a friend.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating subject, wrong author
Review: I learned of the Museum of Jurassic Technology through this very short book, which begins with journalist Lawrence Weschler's description of the exhibits and then goes briefly into the history of museums and the history of this particular museum and its proprietor. But I already feel I know more about it than Weschler.Among other things, the museum is a straight-faced, Andy Kaufman-esque joke, blending exhibits that look too nutty to be true, but are true, with outright hoaxes. Weschler, who apparently came into the Museum of Jurassic Technology with little of the sort of education or interests that would have prepared him for such a place, continually mistakes the veracity of the exhibits one way or the other until he researches each and every one, and in his writing he expects everyone to have had the very same reaction to the exhibits that he did. In other words, he didn't get the joke, and he writes as though he expects us not to. For those, like me, who already knew enough to get it in the first place, reading Weschler's book is like hearing someone explain a joke -- it struck me in many places as laborious and unfunny. Fortunately, the museum itself and Weschler's other material is fascinating stuff on any terms. Weschler does not do justice to the material, but the material is so strong it carries the book anyway. If the idea of visiting a museum that claims to have an X-ray bat that flew so fast it embedded itself in a lead block does not interest you, this is not your book. But if this sort of quasi-Fortean esoterica sounds like your cup of tea, you will enjoy reading about the Museum of Jurassic Technology, if only to know that a place like that exists and to daydream about visiting it someday.
Rating: 
Summary: An artifact of the wondrous Jurassic
Review: I read this book after visiting the beautiful and strange Museum of Jurassic Technology. I was first discomfited to find that the Museum's wonders could be -- how could they be? -- frauds and hoaxes. I was at first crushed and a little annoyed at Mr Weschler's seeming cynicism-- unlike me, he had apparently rushed immediately out to fact-check the exhibits' provenance, and gleefully points out how most visitors had been hoodwinked. However, Mr Weschler moves from simple cynicism to a greater appreciation of the Museum's gnomic aims, and the reader moves with him from everyday disbelief and sour disgruntlement to a rapturous awe. A magnificent book, and a worthy addition to study of the Lower Jurassic.
Rating:
Summary: An artifact of the wondrous Jurassic
Review: I read this book after visiting the beautiful and strange Museum of Jurassic Technology. I was first discomfited to find that the Museum's wonders could be -- how could they be? -- frauds and hoaxes. I was at first crushed and a little annoyed at Mr Weschler's seeming cynicism-- unlike me, he had apparently rushed immediately out to fact-check the exhibits' provenance, and gleefully points out how most visitors had been hoodwinked. However, Mr Weschler moves from simple cynicism to a greater appreciation of the Museum's gnomic aims, and the reader moves with him from everyday disbelief and sour disgruntlement to a rapturous awe. A magnificent book, and a worthy addition to study of the Lower Jurassic.
Rating:
Summary: Yes it's true, the museum exists...but the book is better
Review: Like the 7/18/98 reviewer from Seattle, I took this story at face value and loved it, but then started wondering if the museum even existed...wouldn't it be funny if there were yet another layer in the irony, and Mr. Weschler made it all up? Well, the museum does exist and guess what...the book is better. I'm not sure how this can be; since the book appears to contain only truth, how can truth be better than the truth? But the fact remains that it is.
Rating:
Summary: Bring your dictionary...
Review: OK... this is a fascinating nad highly entertaining bit of book. I truly believe, however, that Mr. Weschler got paid an extra 50 cents every time he made me get my dictionary. So, that part was a tad on the distracting side, but, all in all, a good read.
Rating:
Summary: Want of Wonder
Review: Our lives want wonder; we are never astonished, nothing is
magical, and the improbable is, well ... improbable. Unsettling with allure, Lawrence Weschler's diorama of non-fictive
curiosities draws us so far into belief of wondrous things that when doubt intrudes, our credulity becomes a wonder,
too. Dandled between fantasy and fact, the reader is never
sure whether Mr. Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology can
exist. Just when one is sure that the Cameroonian stink ant,
Theories of Forgetting, and piercing devils all hang together
in some believable, connected universe, evidence of impish
huckstering and manufactured stories raise our doubt. Like the
stink ant we become infected with the brain fungus that eats
our belief in an Aristotlean, Euclidean, and Newtonian world.
Frankly, I don't want to look up the references the author
offers to convince us of what he describes--it's more fun this
way. I've inhaled the spore and my brain is being consumed with...
possibilities.
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