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. Then there’s the stranger-than-fiction Edwin Rist, a brilliant young flautist who, on a pitch-black night nine years ago, in pursuit of an obsession with rare bird feathers, risked years in jail in one of the most brazen and bizarre museum heists ever accomplished. Yet Johnson and Rist are made for one another. Within pages I was hooked. This is a weird and wonderful book.

On the evening of 23 June 2009, Rist, then a 20-year-old Royal Academy of Music student who hoped one day to play principal flute for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, performed in a concert of Haydn, Handel and Mendelssohn.

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