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The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge

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Although it was still too dark to see well, Joe absentmindedly thrust his right hand into the sack to extract the specimen and have a look. Immediately, he winced with pain and yanked out his hand. A tiny black-and-white banded snake, less than ten inches long, was dangling limply from his middle finger, its fangs still sunk into his flesh.

In the fall of 2001, deep in the jungle of Burma, a team of scientists is searching for rare snakes. They are led by Dr. Joe Slowinski, at forty already one of the most brilliant biologists of our time. It is the most ambitious scientific expedition ever mounted into this remote region, venturing into the foothills of the Himalayas. The bold undertaking is brought to a dramatic halt by the bite of the many-banded krait, the deadliest serpent in Asia. In the moment he pulled his hand from the specimen bag and saw the krait, Joe knew that his life was in grave and imminent peril. Thus began one of the most remarkable wilderness rescue attempts of modern times, as Joe's teammates kept him alive for thirty hours by mouth-to-mouth respiration, waiting for a rescue that never came.

A daredevil obsessed with venomous snakes since his youth, Slowinski was a modern-day adventurer who rose quickly to the top of his field, discovering many previously unidentified snake species in his brief yet exhilarating career. The Snake Charmer is at once brilliant biography and exotic travel literature, blended with an accessible introduction to the bizarre, fascinating-and sometimes controversial-world of snake science. The narrative transports the reader into primeval wilderness, from the Everglades to Peru to Burma, in search of rattlesnakes and boa constrictors, kraits and cobras.

Joe Slowinski's career was fast and exciting, his tragic final expedition a pulse-pounding struggle between man and nature. In The Snake Charmer, renowned journalist and author Jamie James captures the life and death of this charismatic, endlessly fascinating man. Exhaustively researched in interviews with Slowinski's colleagues and family, and the author's own trek into the wilds of Burma, this is narrative nonfiction in the tradition of Into the Wild and The Perfect Storm.


PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS:

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 597.9092
EAN: 9781401302139
ISBN: 1401302130
Label: Hyperion
Manufacturer: Hyperion
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2008-06-03
Publisher: Hyperion
Release Date: 2008-06-03
Studio: Hyperion


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers
• Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo
• Stalking the Plumed Serpent and Other Adventures in Herpetology
• Snake Hunting on the Devil's Highway
• The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Of snakes and the man -
There is a whole literature on nature in the widest sense and people who seem suicidal in pursuit of some transcendent experience. The climbers who die on Everest, the kid who walks "Into the Wild," men and women who climb the tallest trees to study their canopies, explorers like Scott and Amundsen, or conquistadors who march into the wilderness in pursuit of riches. Joe Slowinski died studying the snakes he so loved. Other scientists were careless handling snakes, but everyone knew that Joe went overboard, almost challenging death. He certainly was a show off and got a kick out of publicly playing with snakes in ways that shocked people. Hubris? The book discusses his handling of the deadly krait that did him in: whether he or a colleague was negligent, but the immediate cause is much less important. Unlike his more cautious peers, he was often daredevil. Joe was a little like the rattlesnake wranglers who the author does mention but whose lives are covered more extensively elsewhere. They relish challenging death: acting if they were invulnerable. Most of them die from bites. What do they expect? Mourn for Joe? He, like wranglers, asked for it.

I was prepared to not like this book As one Amazon commenter said to the effect, "Why spend so many pages on a narcissist?" Yet the book does work. It is both very informative about snakes, and covers Joe's reckless life. He was a charmer and did add to knowledge of snakes. That he was a scientist more than a seeker of fame is hard to decide. The author says that among "real scientists" fame seeking is looked down on. That is both true and not true. Claims of priority have led to bitter battles among serious scientists or their acolytes. Even Newton and Leibniz are rivally claimed as the inventor of calculus. But with so many popular books on science by scientists and the role of National Geographic and the Nature Channel, the lines get blurry. Lots of scientists are vying for what I call headline science and Joe was one of them (abetted by Cal Academy which gains monetarily from the fame of its scientists). There are literary agents who capitalize on competing scientific assertions recruiting outspoken scientists like Dawkins to sell book. Steven Hawking's and Kip Thorne's bet over black holes makes good p.r. National Geographic staging on Joe's 1999 trip to Burma angered some of the group's scientists. The objecting scientists were edited out of the final film. Even scientists at Cal Academy found scenes of Joe getting bitten as inappropriate. The final field trip to Burma where Joe dies, is a paradigm of pushing the envelop. Because of rivalries between scientists for access to Burma, Joe has to go through back channels to set up the expedition. In so doing the expedition is inadequately supplied, without proper medical support. Joe gets the Academy to go along. Whether Joe would have lived had things been correctly done is open to question. But the expedition itself was more of his daring do.

Besides Joe's personality flaws, the way the book was organized around information on each of the kinds of snakes which held a certain period of Joe's life gives the author an effective literary form to teach readers about snakes. It works by both giving information and keeping the narrative alive with Joe's antics. I learned about rat snakes, copperheads, boas, and kraits. This is a good book.

Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

An Entertaining Three-in-One True Story -
Author Jamie James shot three birds with one bullet in "The Snake Charmer." While the story is about a world's renowned herpetologist, the late Joe Slowinski, James managed to cover along almost seamlessly two other fascinating topics closely intertwined with the life of Joe Slowinski. The first one is the basics of snake taxonomy with illustrated examples of exotic snakes. This is an impressive crash course on the classification in the snake world that brings back the memory of the good old days the last time I touched Biology when I was a senior in high school dealing with the Latin names of plants and animals. In addition to a basic division of non-venomous (Colubridae) and the venomous group; further divided into Viperidae and Elapidae (p.13), James also provides a chilling account of what snake venom is and the kind of havoc it produces; the neurotoxin, whose nervous-system disabling effect is similar to when someone unplugs the power cord of a computer from the electrical outlet, and the hemotoxin; "killing muscle tissues as it inexorably advances through the victim's body" (p.40).

The second one, an equally thrilling one, is a vivid description of Burma; the culture, the government, the people, the cities, and the trails the Slowinski expedition took on to Hkakabo Razi National Park in the northern park of the country; the eastern edge of the Himalayas; perhaps can also be called the Yosemite or the Yellowstone or the Denali of Burma. Maybe I shouldn't brag too much anymore that I really like hiking after getting the written exposure of the kind of trail the Slowinski team took on that was described as setting "a new standard of misery" considering its "muddy trails, bad food, squalid campsites, a deep river of fine, clinging clay mud, malarial mosquitos and sharp-biting sandflies swirled in tormenting clouds; legions of thirsty leeches lurked in every dank, dark recess" (p.5). James' description of the country's history, landscape and the northern tribal people is highly enjoyable. I understand why he calls Burma a "beautiful, unhappy" land. The fact it has a share in the Himalaya range itself with its 19,295-ft Hkakabo Razi summit qualifies it to be classified as beautiful (p.112). It is an unhappy land, not because of poverty per-se, but because of the country's mismanagement under the military junta (p.118-119). After learning about his assessment about Burma, it intrigues me to hear what he thinks of Bali and Indonesia in general since it sounds like James lives in Bali, at least the time he wrote the book when he noted, "...after I returned home to Bali" (p.246).

The biography of Joe Slowinski itself is a touching account of a brilliant yet careless man with a passion for nature, coming from a seemingly humble, hard-working all-American family, though sadly not a happy one. It struck me to read about the political wrangling in high places in the science world as the personal ambition and contention to be the best of the best turned into an extreme ugliness; though Joe's case against Alan Rabinowitz didn't turn into one. The height of a narcissistic spirit can be seen in the case of Edward Cope, belonging to the Anthropometric society, "who basically wanted to study why they were so smart... Before his death, Cope had proposed that he himself be declared the type specimen for Homo Sapiens - the only known species on earth that has no holotype" (p.151).

I thoroughly enjoyed "The Snake Charmer." It is educational, touching, humane, and entertaining; an excellent choice for summer reading materials.

Every Herper should read -
Joe Slowinsky grew up just across state line from me. I have been herping in many of the same places as him. The Snake Charmer is something every one interested in herpetology should read. Its the stupid mistakes that get people killed or injured. If one thing could come out of Joe's death, I hope its that people pay a little more attention to detail and prevent stupid little mistakes.

Brilliant, Fast-Paced, Erudite and Entertaining -
Author Jamie James has created an instant fan in me. A lifelong herpetologist and naturalist, I was immediately drawn to the subject of this work, but it is the novelist in me who finds the most pleasure in the book. It is a biography that reads like a thriller and yet it contains the most fascinating digressions, both in the form of "short-takes" on different snake species and in intellectual tornadoes that spin evolution, biology, religion, philosophy and history in their wake. As if that was not enough, the book manages to weave this extraordinarily rich and textured tale against a backdrop of science in the new millennium, its glories, pitfalls, triumphs and perils. All in all this work is a tour-de-force. Bravo!

Sensational death of a Peter Pan -
I'm at odds about this book. On one hand, I very much enjoyed learning more about herpetology and field biology. The best parts of the book, I thought, delved into advances in the classification of snakes and description of key species. Did you know that nearly all snakes are poisonous but that some are simply not toxic enough to affect humans? I didn't. That some "primitive" snakes such as pythons have pairs of organs (kidneys, lungs, etc.), but that more "evolved" snakes have single organs, making them more streamlined and efficient? Or that those who survive the nearly-always-fatal bite of the Russell's viper undergo a peculiar pituitary reversal, taking on childlike characteristics and becoming hairless, impotent, and sterile?

This sort of snake lore provided a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world. However, overall the book is structured as a biography with herpetological interludes. It commences at the moment when Joe Slowinski, a gifted but reckless herpetologist, was bitten by one of the world's most deadly snakes during an ill-fated expedition in a remote region of Burma. The book then breaks off and returns to Slowinski's childhood and progresses gradually back to the point of the fatal bite, which ultimately kills Slowinski after prolonged and heroic efforts to keep him alive.

Author James, in the epilogue, makes the connection between Slowinski's rashness and overconfidence and his death, but I still had difficulty overcoming an aversion to the beer-swilling, macho Slowinski, who at thirty-eight still behaved like a disarmingly charming but socially stunted twelve-year-old. I suppose I've met too many characters in this mold over the years to retain much regard for them. They gravitate toward the never-never land of labs and field research, places that allow them to obsess over a chosen subject, insulated from significant moral and social development.

James does a good job of scrupulously telling Slowinski's tale, and he has a clear, easy-to-digest style that makes for rapid reading. But I found myself wondering if his efforts to be even handed about his subject -- not to mention safeguard access to his sources of information, including Slowinski's parents, sister, and friends -- led him to indulge in a bit of hagiography. Slowinski's manner of death may have been sensational, but I didn't feel his life itself merited the full biographical treatment.

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