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

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

by Jamie James

(Hyperion, $25)

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Joe Slowinski’s boyhood passion for snakes led him into a life of careful scholarship and muddy expeditions. In September 2001, the world-renowned herpetologist woke up early one morning in a tiny Myanmar hamlet and stepped outside to inspect the previous day’s catch. The snakes were in sacks on a worktable, being organized by an assistant. Slowinski asked about a banded 10-inch specimen, and was handed one of the bags. Slowinski reached in and winced. The snake that was dangling from his finger when he pulled his hand out was not the harmless Dinodon he’d expected but a venomous krait.

No other snake in the world, in fact, could be classified as a more efficient killer than the snake that took Slowinski’s life, said Melissa Rohlin in the Los Angeles Times. A krait’s venom shuts down the nervous system, causing a victim’s breathing to stop within four hours. But like Jon Krakauer’s portrait of the doomed adventure-seeker in Into the Wild, Jamie James’ portrait of Slowinski turns a growing sense of hopelessness into the dramatic engine of a compelling story. James tells Slowinski’s life story through flashbacks, and he so identifies with his subject that the book “feels as if the author were joining him on the journey and participating joyfully in its dangers and conquests.”

“For all its high drama,” said Eric Ormsby in The New York Sun, The Snake Charmer is at heart “a book about strangeness.” The snakes that Slowinski and his colleagues pursue are rare specimens, yet the scientists themselves are James’ most exotic subjects of all. “They have their own lingo, their own customs, their private codes,” as well as astonishing tenacity. When Slowinski stops breathing, his peers keep him alive for 24 hours with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as they wait in vain for a helicopter rescue. Slowinski, meanwhile, calmly details the nature of his symptoms to his anguished friends. By dedicating his final hours to his chosen field, said People, he earned the “remarkable tribute” James has written.