I wanted to read this book after reading about it in Still Life, a book about taxidermy. I thought it was going to be more about the museums and how they operate, their history and the people who made them happen. While to a certain extent some of this is true, I found myself crazy bored by descriptions of Darwinian evolution, taxonomy, classificatory systems, and complicated histories of scientists and theorists. Ugh. The parts describing Asma's research, fun side facts, and much of the strange and wonderful juicy bits that one expects when reading about natural history museums were great, and Asma is a great writer. But his book was not really what I was hoping for.