(Crown, 336 pages, $25)
“If you visited a major zoo anytime from the 1960s to the 1990s,” chances are good that the scaly creatures you saw in the reptile room got there illegally, said Randy Dotinga in The Christian Science Monitor. Journalist Jennie Erin Smith’s deeply funny new book unveils the “colorful, law-unabiding characters” behind that underground trade. Her subjects are men who spent their boyhoods in basements playing with pythons and their adulthoods smuggling baby boas onto commercial flights in suitcases, in socks—even, in one case, in a prosthetic leg. A federal crackdown in the late 1990s all but ended the racket, but for years, “zoo officials either looked the other way” or “actively slithered into illegal deals” with these rogues.
Smith couldn’t have found a better collection of characters than the “risk junkies” she’s assembled, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. In their heyday, these ponytailed “snake geeks” lived lives straight out of “an Elmore Leonard novel.” There’s Hank Molt (his real name), who ran a “mammal-free pet shop” in Philadelphia before he started assembling a ragtag cadre of smugglers, including one known for carrying a suitcase “filled with knives and dead birds and LSD.” Molt’s main rival, Tommy Crutchfield, was a steroid-popping snake enthusiast with a “background in the Southern tradition of private roadside zoos.” One Crutchfield sidekick made it through a frisking once by telling customs that the python under his shirt was a tumor.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
“This is all disgraceful, of course,” said Carolyn See in The Washington Post. These men profess to love reptiles, but they had no qualms about bundling up shipments of 100 baby snakes knowing that only half were likely to survive. To her credit, though, “she refuses to judge.” She has homed in on a bigger story, about “the futility of much human endeavor.” Her smugglers, who are at once “stunningly innovative” and “dizzyingly incompetent,” operate in a world most of us have never seen. But their day-to-day struggle to keep the game afloat feels awfully familiar.
-
Helsinki's year of zero road fatalitiesUnder the Radar Finland's 'Vision Zero' safety strategy 'shifts responsibility for crashes from road users to the designers of the road system'
-
Critics' choice: Outstanding new Japanese restaurantsFeature An all-women sushi team, a 15-seat listening bar, and more
-
Why do Dana White and Donald Trump keep pushing for a White House UFC match?TODAY'S BIG QUESTION The president and the sports mogul each have their own reasons for wanting a White House spectacle
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”