The Museum of Whales You Will Never See

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A beguiling portrait of Iceland through its most unusual museums, and a poetic tribute to the pleasures of collectingIceland 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 anecdotes both elegiac and entrancing, and in 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, their dreams and visions. "The world is chock-a-block with untold wonders, " she writes, "there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open.