Dreambirds

"The ostrich is one of nature's misfits: a gigantic bird that can neither fly nor sing. But the fin-de-siecle fetish for feathers made ostrich plumes more precious than gold, sparking an ostrich craze as lucrative and riotous as the tulip mania of the Renaissance. Jewish refugees fleeing the Lithuanian pogroms created an ostrich boomtown in the South African desert, where they erected fantastic Gothic palaces on fortunes made from feathers. Then the wheel of Parisian fashion turned, and the ostrich craze went bust." "Rob Nixon grew up in South Africa near the Karoo, the swath of desert where…