Maggie Fergusson

Making feathers fly

In June 2009 Edwin Rist made off with 299 stuffed birds from the Natural History Museum in Tring, worth $1 million

issue 28 April 2018

They don’t look like a natural pair. First there’s the author, Kirk Wallace Johnson, a hero of America’s war in Iraq and a modern-day Schindler who, as USAID’s only Arabic-speaking American employee, arranged for hundreds of Iraqis to find safe haven in the US. In the process, he developed PTSD, sleepwalked through a hotel window, flung himself from a ledge and plunged, nearly, to his death.

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