hardy______!__post

I was a little bit disappointed, after all the anticipation Preston sparks in his preface, that Charles Sternberg was to be described as one of the “hardworking but unimaginative compilers of data” (73). In the preface to Dinosaurs in the Attic, he was mentioned, in all his awesome mystery, as “the free-lance dinosaur hunter . . . whom almost no one has ever heard of” (ix). A brief glimpse suggesting great romance and creativity and adherence to principles and no principles at all and danger! Whether or not Sternberg was any of these things is unclear, but Preston’s later description left me feeling, at the least, a bit empty.
But he makes up for his inadequate telling with his textual recreation of Roy Chapman Andrews’s mad, heroic life-charge. Fifteen years after scrubbing the floors of the Museum, he’s trekking through the Great Wall of China in a Dodge automobile, backed by a grand brigade. And the discoveries he manages! And the picture of him (I looked up the one he mentions, of Andrews sitting on the hill with his rifle and jackboots) truly is the Indiana Jones prototype. Huge dangers encountered (and handled) in the name of figuring human origin. There is no better movie.