The Last Dinosaur Book

The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon

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by W. J. T. Mitchell

University of Chicago Press

Due/Published September 1998, 308 pages, cloth

ISBN 0226532046

For animals that have been dead millions of years, dinosaurs are extraordinarily pervasive in our everyday lives. Appearing in ads, books, movies, museums, television, toy stores, and novels, they continually fascinate both adults and children. How did they move from natural extinction to pop culture resurrection? What is the source of their powerful appeal? Until now, no one has addressed this question in a comprehensive way. In this exploration of the animal's place in our lives, W. J. T. Mitchell shows why we are so attached to the myth and the reality of the "terrible lizards." Drawing a distinction between Dinosauria, a scientific grouping of extinct land animals, and dinosaurs, the cultural icons, Mitchell traces the family tree of the latter. What he discovers is a creature of striking flexibility, linked to dragons and mammoths, skyscrapers and steam engines, cowboys and Indians. In the vast territory between the cunning predators of Jurassic Park and the mawkishly sweet Barney, from political leviathans to corporate icons, from paleontology to Barnum and Bailey, Mitchell finds a cultural symbol whose plurality of meaning and often contradictory nature is emblematic of modern society itself.

Review

If millions of years from now the inhabitants of earth dug up the remains of late twentieth-century America they of course wouldn’t find dinosaur bones, but instead a near-fanatical interest in the extinct species. What is behind this obsession with dinosaurs is the question that drives Mitchell’s brilliant, and insightful new work. Mitchell’s unique work of critical criticism examines the ambivalent status of the dinosaur in contemporary culture -- alternately viewed as powerful and fierce beasts, slow-witted monsters, intelligent animals with family-values just like us, extinct, the ancestors of birds, etc. The varied understandings of the dinosaur beginning with the great dinosaur boom in the mid-nineteenth century has made it a kind of all-purpose of icon or metaphor in American culture. W.J.T. Mitchell (one of our best iconologists) with wit and perception discusses examples from popular culture that draw on (either subtly or directly) the idea of the dinosaur in its many guises. Thus, The Last Dinosaur Book (by the way, Mitchell know it won’t be), discusses such diverse subjects as the film "Jurassic Park" (naturally), dinosaur kitsch, paleontology, popular science fiction, natural history museums, "The Far Side" comic strip and others. Mitchell’s work, probably the first look at the cultural status of dinosaurs is a an uncommonly well-written work of cultural studies as well as one the better-designed academic titles of the past year. Not to be missed.

In a review of the book, Wendy Steiner, author of The Scandal of Pleasure, writes, “This cultural history shows that even the most troglodytic of homines erecti -- scholars -- know how to have a little fun, explaining how the history of dinosaur images ‘is inseparable from the larger story of modern banking, fossil fuels, the oil and steel industries, and advancements in technology.’ A lavishly illustrated, brilliantly designed book, Mitchell’s study is full of startling and insightful observations.”