Description: Best-selling author Clara Pinto-Correia, in recounting the story of the Dodo, tells us how the very first humans to see the Dodo were likely Europeans. And she describes how they first recorded its existence in writing, christened it "the crazy bird" and "the lazy bird", and brought it home to live in captivity and be studied, drawn, and stuffed. These travelers from halfway around the world were obsessed with the bird, first as an exotic novelty, and eventually (some believed) as an example of how evolution worked on an isolated island paradise. Pinto-Correia shows in this remarkable book not only how humans preyed on the bird itself, but how the human intellect and imagination preyed on the sketchy facts of the Dodo's story. She teaches us not just about the ill-fated bird from Mauritius, but about our abiding need to make sense, however tenuous it may be, of the world around us.

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