Thoroughly unreadable. It's like an awkward, dry dissertation. Though unlike a dissertation, the author employs the laziness of middle schoolers everywhere trying to pad a word count - say the same damn thing over and over again in as many ways as possible. Thoughts are disjointed, one paragraph usually does not lead into the next with any smooth fluidity, and train of thought frequently derails killing all passengers. It references many out-of-copyright paintings, engravings, and carvings but doesn't bother to include about half of them (despite how much it presses the importance of them). The author often follows false logics (because "x" happened, "y" must have happened - regardless of lack of evidence). There are frequent jumps in logic such as: because there's no evidence that Clara's coach ever broke down, it must not have broken down. Each chapter more or less follows the same formula: Van der Meer needed to take Clara to (prominent city) but had difficulty moving such a large creature; everyone rushed to see Clara regardless of station in life; disjointed information about the political climate of the current city; local celebrity who loved Clara coupled with quotes about rhinos (that may or may not fit the current topic of discussion), how Van der Meer advertised Clara; unrelated discourse on the social climate of the current city; Van de Meer was brilliant for X and Y reasons; on to the next city!
It's just really boring! ( )

A perfectly fine, just not particularly interesting or impressive account of a rhinoceros in Europe. Given what she had to work with Ridley did an admirable job with this book, but it's little more than a popular account of Clara's journey. ( )

Clara's Grand Tour (2006) by Glynis Ridley is quite simply the delightful tale of a rhinoceros and her travels in Europe in the Eighteenth-Century. I learned about Clara on my trip to the Getty Center in Los Angeles where her portrait was the centerpiece of an exhibit of paintings by Jean-Baptiste Oudry.

Clara was a young Indian rhinoceros purchased in 1741 by Dutch sea captain Douwemout Van der Meer who then transported her to Europe. For the next 17 years, Clara and Van der Meer traveled across Europe, often in a specially designed wagon, and occasionally on a barge along the River Rhine. I don't know if the pun would work in Dutch, but Ridley makes no mention of Van der Meer advertising her as a Rhine-oceros on these occasions.

At any rate, Clara was the first live rhinoceros in Europe for centuries and she attracted crowds wherever she traveled including royalty, philosophes, and artists. Ridley credits Van der Meers advance notice posters as the first multi-national advertising campaign. Similarly, Clara created a cottage industry in memorabilia from commemorative medals to high-class decorative arts in her image. Paris and the court of Louis XV were swept up in rhinomania with Clara inspiring fashions and fads. The king himself though balked at the cost Van der Meer asked for purchase, so Clara did not get to retire in the menagerie at Versailles.

Clara died on tour in London with the location of her remains now unknown, and Van der Meer faded from the written record. During her time, she helped redefine the image of rhinoceros for Europeans familiar with myth and scripture regarding unicorns and Behemoths. Her gentle nature contradicted that legend that rhinoceros and elephants are mortal enemies who will fight to the death. Similarly, Clara captured in art provided the first real image of the rhinoceros to a society reliant for centuries on Albrecht Dürer's image of a rhinoceros in armor. On a total tangent, I love how things in my life totally overlap so that while I was reading this book this image appeared in my Bloglines in this post on Lorcan Dempsey's weblog (where it's used for an analogy about social networking tools).

I enjoyed this book despite the fact that Ridley writes in a dry academic style. Her constant hedging on what she has reasonable proof to be accurate is distracting. Similarly, she constantly refers to images of which only a few are included in the book, and they are packed in the mid-section of the book not with the text that describes them. Still, how could you not like a book about a rhinoceros traveling across Europe, especially with details like her love for oranges and tobacco smoke? ( )

There has been a veritable deluge of books about the post-Renaissance European conception of the rhinoceros of late – well, two anyway.
This is by far the best of the two. I found the other one (Lawrence Norfolk's ‘The Pope's Rhinoceros’,) confusing and dense, though it did have some surpassingly fine gross-out scenes.
Norfolk’s novel, this book tells me, was a fictionalization of a real event: in 1516 the king of Portugal sent a rhinoceros (the first in Europe since Roman times) as a gift for Pope Leo X. That poor animal fell off the ship en route to Rome and died an undignified death, leaving a trail of secondhand accounts but not many eyewitnesses.
The image of a rhinoceros most commonly seen, up till Clara’s arrival in the mid-1700s, was Dürer's famous and extremely inaccurate woodcut, based on secondhand reports of the animal that was to be the Pope's. Ridley puts forth an interesting argument that Dürer's rhinoceros is actually depicted as garbed in battle armor – hence the extra horn and bizarre armor-plate appearance.
Clara, an Indian rhinoceros, was orphaned when she was only months old and hand-raised by a Dutch merchant in Assam, India. Clara was purchased by an entrepreneurial Dutch sea captain and shipped back to Europe. For nearly 20 years in the mid-1700s, Clara and her owner traveled the continent where she became a sensation. People flocked to see this amazing animal for the first time for themselves. Making this an even more amazing achievement is that Clara weighed 3 tonnes and it happened before railways and modern roads existed.
In one of the first marketing campaigns of all time, her owner promoted Clara's appearances to peasants and royalty alike. There were Clara product tie-ins galore: poems, songs, fashions, portraits, etchings, and bronze figurines. Her image adorned everything from tin coins to fine porcelain, and made a fortune for the Dutch captain.
Ridley, a first-time author, is a professor of 18th-century studies and ‘Clara's Grand Tour’ reads like a historical monograph, putting a narrative on a skeleton of facts, every statement not known for sure chaperoned by a knowledgeable guide. Clara's journey across Europe, and the attitudes and experiences of the people involved, are extrapolated from maps, a few contemporary accounts and commonsense analysis of what life was like at the time.
I was afraid that ‘Clara's Grand Tour’, like some other histories with similarly narrow subjects, would blow its subject matter out of proportion and try to convince me that Clara's trip through Europe was the fulcrum on which all history turned. Fortunately the book's goals are modest. Clara revolutionized the European conception of the rhinoceros, but this was only possible because the people who paid to see her had never seen a rhinoceros before. Clara's story touches on the story of the history of religion and philosophy, but only in regards to theological arguments about Behemoth and Voltaire's spats with everyone less clever than him. The story recalls the Renaissance struggle to recapture ancient knowledge, but only in regards to the lost art of rhinoceros-handling.
Instead of a single too-broad thesis, we get many interesting details at the edges of Clara's journeys (the prison-like porcelain factory of Messein, for instance, sticks in my mind). For nearly 20 years, Clara was an exhibit, a celebrity affecting the lives of countless others in small ways. She fits into history as part of the story of celebrity and spectacle, and as a way to explore the stories of those she connected with. ‘Clara's Grand Tour ‘ follows both threads without overreaching.
This is a quiet and modest gem. ( )

We really feel quite fond of Clara. We now know considerably more about 18th Century rhinos...! ( )