‘Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures’ by Katherine Rundell.If, you, too, have been intensely concentrating on the presidential election, you may be ready for a shift of focus. Vanishing Treasures, an extraordinary book by Katherine Rundell (originally published under the title The Golden Mole in the UK) lifts readers out of the here and now and invites us to train our eyes on wider horizons.
Rundell is a publishing phenom. Her 2013 middle-grade children’s book Rooftoppers drew inspiration from her own adventures as an undergraduate at Oxford, where she climbed brick walls and scaled drainpipes to take in the views of that “city of dreaming spires” from on high. More recently, Rundell has written Super-Infinite, an acclaimed biography of the metaphysical poet John Donne, as well as a bestselling fantasy novel, called Impossible Creatures.
In short, Rundell is something of a Renaissance woman who writes with the elegance and erudition that distinguished that era. Vanishing Treasures is a bestiary, a collection of creatures, both odd and mundane — all of whom are more astonishing than you might expect; all of whom, as Rundell tells us are “endangered or [contain] a subspecies that is endangered — because there is almost no creature on the planet, now, for which that is not the case.”
Rundell begins her book with an epigraph from an author whose reputation is itself approaching extinction: the British essayist and mystery writer, G.K. Chesterton: “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
