Dreambirds [Dream Birds]: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune
Ostriches are curious birds, comfortably fitting into no  single biological category--for which reason Carl von Linné,  the taxonomist, called itStruthio camelus, the  "sparrow-camel." An Arab folktale confirms Linné's choice,  relating that when it was asked to choose just which camp it belonged  to, the ostrich could not decide whether to be a bird or a mammal, for  which God condemned it to live alone in one of the harshest deserts on  earth, the Karoo of South Africa.The Karoo, it happens, is Rob  Nixon's native ground, and although he has spent much of his adult  life in the United States teaching literature, the desert landscape  haunts his dreams. (So, too, do ostriches, about which Nixon commands  a phenomenal amount of information.) Thefantasyof Nixon's  subtitle speaks not only to some of his late-night thoughts about the  land of his birth, but also to the would-be empires of the Karoo's  early European settlers, who sought their fortunes in gold and  diamonds--and then, when that did not work, in ostrich feathers, a  highly sought fashion commodity as subject to cycles of boom and bust  as any other trade good. Nixon charts the fortunes of the Karoo's  19th-century "ostrich elite," updating their story with an  appropriately curious recent development: the introduction of  industrial ostrich ranching to the American Southwest, where a new  generation of dreamers is hoping to make their fortunes in eggs,  leather, meat, and other products.Literate, learned, and  endlessly entertaining,Dreambirdsis mandatory reading for  ostrich fanciers everywhere.--Gregory McNamee