-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums
by Kendra Greene
Book Reviewed by:Mythic creatures, natural wonders, and the mysterious human impulse to collect are on beguiling display in this poetic tribute to the museums of an otherworldly island nation.
Iceland is home to only 330,000 people but more than 265 museums and public collections, ranging from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: How to display what can't be seen?
In The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, A. Kendra Greene is our wise and whimsical guide through this cabinet of curiosities, showing us, in dreamlike anecdotes and more than thirty charming illustrations, how a seemingly random assortment of objects--a stuffed whooper swan, a rubber boot, a shard of obsidian, a chastity belt for rams--can map a people's past and future, their fears and obsessions. "The world is chockablock with untold wonders," she writes, "there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open."
"Museums...are collections sorted and arranged into stories, given order and explanation and sense," A. Kendra Greene writes in The Museum of Whales You Will Never See. Greene's roving, ranging book of essays takes the reader on a tour of a handful of them. But this is no mere travelogue. Greene's work is itself a collection of varied, disparate pieces—long-form journalism, personal essay, history, academic treatise—arranged into winsome stories that seek to give "order and explanation and sense" to the author's journey to understand one question: How does a collection become more than the objects within it?..continued
Full Review
(502 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Lisa Bintrim).
.jpg "Map of Iceland showing Eyjafjallajökull volcanic site")
As A. Kendra Greene writes in The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, "Everywhere in Iceland is some kind of remote. It is almost always a word I reach for when describing a place here, though I mean it differently every time." Greene makes it clear that understanding Iceland requires understanding its geography, which affects not only where people live but how they live and how they see themselves.
Iceland sits in the Atlantic Ocean, between Greenland and the United Kingdom. About the size of Kentucky, it has around 3,100 miles of ragged coast, pocked by long, deep fjords and bays. Largely formed of plateaux interspersed with mountain peaks, volcanoes and ice fields, the majority of the country—about 80 percent, including most...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, try these:
by Kate Harris
Published 2019
A brilliant, fierce writer makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road—an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and the natural world.
by Michael Meyer
Published 2016
A combination of memoir, contemporary reporting, and historical research, presenting a unique profile of China's legendary northeast territory.
.gif)
Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation, but they pass far above and over the ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
A masterpiece. By way of exploring the many humble, arguably eccentric museums of Iceland, Greene gives us a portrait of humanity that is quietly, cumulatively thrilling, as startling in its many revelations as the collections and collectors she portrays. Greene is the best kind of guide: funny, probing, generous of mind and heart, fully alive to the essential human yearning expressed in these miraculous little museums. Read this book. You will be happier, and richer in spirit, for it.
