A richly detailed narrative of global malfeasance.
Freelance science reporter Smith debuts with an exciting tale of reptile smuggling.
During the Victorian era’s natural-history craze, British museums hired working-class freelancers to collect Asian wildlife specimens. Later, zoos in the United States turned to similar adventurers to obtain live animals. By World War II, the heyday of specimen collecting had ended. But that did not deter two young snake-smitten Americans, Hank Molt and Tom Crutchfield, from embarking on the colorful careers recounted here. For several decades, separately and together, they lied, cheated and skirted the law in an obsessive worldwide quest for rare species to sell to eager curators. Many of their best deals violated wildlife export bans and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. A former salesman taken from childhood by “the romance of the snake,” Molt began dealing in reptiles in the 1960s, when the animal trade was still little regulated. Working out of a Pennsylvania pet shop (with help from a crazy ex-con), then from a brick storefront called the Exotarium, he filled the wish lists of many zoos. Once, he created a fake research institute in New Guinea to procure lizards and pythons for the Knoxville Zoo. Federal officials pursued Molt, calling him “an agent of extinction” and the “kingpin” of a multimillion-dollar smuggling ring. In fact, he netted $39,000 in his best year. Smith describes Molt’s escapades as he travels around the world, using bribes, flattery and phony zoo uniforms, as needed, to acquire animals and get them safely past U.S. inspectors. In the ’80s, his Florida-based rival Crutchfield, inspired by the Southern snake men who supplied traveling carnivals, quit his own sales job and built a hugely successful reptile business. His 120-acre Herpetofauna compound included a barn the size of an airplane hangar filled with lizards, turtles and snakes. Narcissistic and violent, he eventually became down-on-his-luck Molt’s biggest buyer. Both men did time in prison, but kept coming back. “I’m addicted to drama,” said Molt.
A richly detailed narrative of global malfeasance.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-38147-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
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