IN SEARCH OF LAKE MONSTERS

by Peter Costello ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1974

Anyone who's ever been interested in lake and/or sea serpents will be hard pressed to remain so after this tedious book, which ingeniously manages to make monster-hunting sound about as thrilling as doing the family laundry on a rainy Sunday. For those who never had much interest in whether the Loch Ness monster is a large seal, otter, eel, fake, or (mirabile dictu!) a ""plesiosaur"" (a word apparently in such common usage the author doesn't bother to define it), it is instant shut-eye to pore through the endless and virtually interchangeable (aesthetically, if not descriptively) accounts of apparently everybody who ever saw it, plus others who tried and failed, not to mention similarly trivial and boring reports about strange creatures of the deep everywhere from the Americas to the Orient. Unlike what the title misleadingly suggests, this is no flashlight and infrared photo in the night suspense stuff, just secondhand culling of ether folks' visions and intellectually unimpressive speculations on whether the dragon of the Ishtar gate of Babylon was mythological or real. The real mystery is that so many people seem to give a damn.

Pub Date: July 1, 1974

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1974

Categories: NONFICTION