Unearthing the Dragon, Mark Norell
Ostensibly about the discovery of feathered dinosaurs and the science surrounding them, this book also contains a fair amount of male-gazey exoticisation of China. It’s full of photographs — more photographs and images than text sometimes — and a large amount of both photos and text is about China. Modern China, that is: the culture Norell ran into when working there, his nights out, his visits to markets, his thoughts on the people, and the shapely feet of young Chinese women. Seriously!
There are some nuggets of useful information in here about feathered dinosaurs, and some gorgeous pictures both of modern China and of dinosaur fossils, but I would honestly skip it. There’s something very gross about the way he treats China and particularly Chinese women: like some kind of tourist attraction.
Hmm, that male gaze thing I find quite creepy and somehow sullying. Thanks for the tip-off!
Yeah. Like one of the images is actually a young woman’s foot with a fossil for… some reason?! The caption is literally: “Not all dinosaurs were big. Here is the skull of a small toodontid, an animal closely related to bird origins, with a lovely foot for scale.” What!
Wha-!
Sounds like a foot fetishist deciding to come out in print. ☹️