If you follow these simple rules, you can enjoy keeping a whole menagerie of snakes, frogs, turtles, lizards, salamanders, iguanas or alligators—over 200 species covered. "YA...Comprehensive...Handsome, authoritative text."— Booklist . "One of the 100 outstanding sci-tech books for general collections."— LJ . 334 pages (16 in color), 5 1/2 X 8 3/4.
I was a little unsure of how to rate this one. On one hand, this book was written in 1982, so a lot of information in it is reflective of that time. It has a lot of outdated information, which is to be expected. It also had some really weird husbandry advice in there that I don’t think should ever be followed and could potentially be harmful to reptiles, and is also so OBVIOUSLY American. On the other hand, it was interesting to see how things were thought through, justified, and done back in that time and how far herpetoculture has come when compared to how we do things now. There was some things in there that were interesting and still of use today. This book also focuses on American species of reptiles and amphibians and species that are able to be kept in America. So if you’re in a country that doesn’t allow for the keeping of those species, half the book isn’t going to be of any use, or possibly any interest, to you. Overall, it was okay but would I have been sad if I hadn’t read it? Probably not