DRAGON HUNTER

A WASP hunts dinosaurs in the Gobi.

A generation or two ago young men used to read stories like this over and over again, which is both the strength and the weakness of archaeologist Gallenkamp’s (Maya, not reviewed) biography of the adventurous paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews. Throughout the 1920s Andrews led a series of expeditions into Mongolia under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Known as the Central Asiatic Expeditions, they never achieved their original goal of proving that Asia, rather than Africa, was the cradle of mankind, but they did make spectacular fossil finds, chart vast areas of the Gobi, and win extraordinary fame for Andrews, who fit the model of gentleman-adventurer to a tee. The author relates Andrews’s adventures entertainingly enough, although not with the elegance that Andrews himself displayed in his many books and articles. And while Andrews’s expeditions (sponsored in part by Standard Oil and Dodge) may not have the romance of Sven Heden’s or Sir Francis Younghusband’s, there are more than enough close scrapes and exotic locales to keep the pages turning. Still, in the end both Andrews’s life and Gallenkamp’s telling leave a sour taste in the mouth, for the Central Asiatic Expeditions had a eugenic rationale that is barely touched on here, and the condescending tone with which the polo playing, openly imperialistic Andrews treated the Chinese is odious. The author disclaims racism and imperialism, but he does nothing to distance himself from Andrews’s view that the Chinese were being silly in placing restrictions on what he did in (and removed from) Chinese territory; for the most part, in fact, his voice blends with Andrews’s on these points. Such unadulterated hero worship is not only unsettling, but bad scholarship as well.

An old-fashioned adventure story, for better or worse.