Program Description
Event Details
Join us for the Pacific Beach Library's monthly book discussion! Our group meets in a hybrid format, so you can choose whether you'd prefer to join us in-person in the PB Library's Community Room or virtually (please send an email to cwainwright@sandiego.gov for this year's Teams login info).
Description: On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins--some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's who'd risked everything to gather them--and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.
If you'd like to check out a print copy of the book, they are available 1 month before each discussion at the Pacific Beach Library's Circulation Desk. Please call 858-581-9934 x0 before coming to pick it up so that staff may confirm availability.
Book Discussion Calendar
- January 8, 2026: Select titles to discuss in 2026
- February 12: James by Percival Everett
- March 12: The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See
- April 9: The Feather Thief : Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson
- May 14: Feeding Ghosts by Tess Hulls
- June 11: The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
- July 9: The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson
- August 13: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
- September 10: Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach
- October 8: What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
- November 12: One Book, One San Diego selection (to be announced)
- December 10: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
- January 14, 2027: Select titles to discuss in 2027
- February 11, 2027: An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin