Books, Arts & Manners: About That Baboon . . .

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America, by Peter Washington (Schocken, 470 pp., $27.50)

ALL RIGHT, the baboon. It was stuffed and bespectacled and stood in Madame’s parlor, wearing a wing collar, morning coat, and tie, with tucked beneath its hairy arm the manuscript of a lecture on The Origin of Species, the book alleged to document its kinship with humans. Its name, shared with a prominent Darwinian academic, was “Professor Fiske,” and it was clearly either setting forth to deliver the lecture or just back from having done so. The place was New York, the time the mid 1870s.

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Hugh Kenner

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Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America, by Peter Washington (Schocken, 470 pp., $27.50)

ALL RIGHT, the baboon. It was stuffed and bespectacled and stood in Madame’s parlor, wearing a wing collar, morning coat, and tie, with tucked beneath its hairy arm the manuscript of a lecture on The Origin of Species, the book alleged to document its kinship with humans. Its name, shared with a prominent Darwinian academic, was “Professor Fiske,” and it was clearly either setting forth to deliver the lecture or just back from having done so. The place was New York, the time the mid 1870s.