Reviewed by Nicki Laskowski

In her book The Medici Giraffe and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power, author Marina Belozerskaya proves herself capable of bringing the dead to life. Beginning with Alexandria in 275 BC and ending with the 20th century, the seven sections of The Medici Giraffe take a look at how exotic animals influenced the political arena: how elephants acted as soldiers and struck fear in the hearts of opponents, how a giraffe helped the Medici family establish political backing in Italy, how Cortés’ acquisition of Montezuma’s collection of human specimens (like albinos) brought to him immense popularity in Spain.      

“In our age of easy travel and global media, exotic animals still delight but rarely truly astonish us,” Belozerskaya writes in her introduction. “We are superficially familiar with a great variety of them and tend to take them for granted.”      

The Medici Giraffe is an astonishing tale of how the right exotic gift or acquisition was the key to power and success, and how a number of political leaders obtained massive collections of exotic animals only to become obsessively fascinated by controlling these wild things.

In between the tales of exotic animals, Belozerskaya gives detailed background on the time periods and the characters she writes about. An intense researcher, Belozerskaya is capable of making the Italy of the 1400s or the Mexico of the 1500s or the California of the late 1800s come alive. She does not do this simply through descriptive writing; Belozerskaya compares foreign social situations and political struggles to familiar animal clichés.       

And rather than simply describe a buried age, Belozerskaya poses questions that help to situate her readers’ perspective, making this refreshing historical account accessible and interesting.

For example, when Cortés approaches Tenochtitlan in Mexico, Belozerskaya writes: “Was the fair newcomer the bloodthirsty god of the sun and war, Huitzilopochtli? The more benign Quetzalcoatl? The mercurial Tezcatlipoca, god of “affliction and anguish,” who enjoyed cheating people out of their property and “brought all things down?” Or some other divinity? Whoever he was, his advance spelled trouble.”

Belozerskaya’s The Medici Giraffe is a gateway into the past and into an understanding of how powerful the “exotic” can be.