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Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature
This is a book about some of nature's most alluring and forbidding creatures, written by a man with an abiding passion for snakes, as well as for science, the fate of the planet, and the wonder of life. Harry Greene presents every facet of the natural history of snakes―their diversity, evolution, and conservation―and at the same time makes a personal statement of why these animals are so compelling.
This book provides an up-to-date summary of the biology of snakes on a global basis. Eight chapters are devoted to general biology topics, including anatomy, feeding, venoms, predation and defense, social behavior, reproduction, evolution, and conservation; eight chapters survey the major snake groups, including blindsnakes, boas, colubrids, stiletto snakes, cobras, sea snakes, and vipers. Details of particular interest, such as coral snake mimicry and the evolution of the0 rattle, are highlighted as special topics. Chapter introductory essays are filled with anecdotes that will tempt nonspecialists to read on, while the book's wealth of comprehensive information will gratify herpeto-culturalists and professional biologists.
Greene's writing is clear, engaging, and full of appreciation for his subject. Michael and Patricia Fogden are known internationally for their outstanding work, and their stunning color photographs of snakes in their natural habitats are a brilliant complement to Greene's text. Here is a scientific book that provides accurate information in an accessible way to general readers, strongly advocates for a persecuted group of animals, encourages conservation―not just of snakes but of ecosystems―and credits science for enriching our lives. In helping readers explore the role of snakes in human experience, Greene and the Fogdens show how science and art can be mutual pathways to understanding.
This book provides an up-to-date summary of the biology of snakes on a global basis. Eight chapters are devoted to general biology topics, including anatomy, feeding, venoms, predation and defense, social behavior, reproduction, evolution, and conservation; eight chapters survey the major snake groups, including blindsnakes, boas, colubrids, stiletto snakes, cobras, sea snakes, and vipers. Details of particular interest, such as coral snake mimicry and the evolution of the0 rattle, are highlighted as special topics. Chapter introductory essays are filled with anecdotes that will tempt nonspecialists to read on, while the book's wealth of comprehensive information will gratify herpeto-culturalists and professional biologists.
Greene's writing is clear, engaging, and full of appreciation for his subject. Michael and Patricia Fogden are known internationally for their outstanding work, and their stunning color photographs of snakes in their natural habitats are a brilliant complement to Greene's text. Here is a scientific book that provides accurate information in an accessible way to general readers, strongly advocates for a persecuted group of animals, encourages conservation―not just of snakes but of ecosystems―and credits science for enriching our lives. In helping readers explore the role of snakes in human experience, Greene and the Fogdens show how science and art can be mutual pathways to understanding.
366 pages, Paperback
First published May 18, 1997
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152 people want to read
About the author
Harry W. Greene
28 books13 followersHarry W. Greene is the Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University and the recipient of the E.O. Wilson Award from the American Society of Naturalists. His book Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature (UC Press), won the PEN Literary Award and was a New York Times Notable Book.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 24, 2024
A large coffee table book. Plenty to read and learn.
December 23, 2025
To open “Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature” is to feel, almost at once, the familiar tightening in the body – the small, inherited recoil that arrives before thought. Greene knows that recoil. He does not mock it, nor does he soothe it with the usual lullabies of reassurance. Instead, he treats fear as a kind of fossil – an artifact of our evolutionary and cultural past – and then he begins doing what a serious naturalist does with any artifact: he places it on the table, turns it under the light, and asks what it is made of.
The book’s first achievement is tonal. Greene writes in a register that is both intimate and exacting, as though a field notebook had learned to sing without losing its measurements. He can give you the technical scaffolding of a skull and, on the next page, the sensation of humidity in a lowland forest, the sudden electric clarity of seeing an animal that has spent most of its life being misseen. His sentences lean into metaphor, but they do not escape into it. The prose keeps returning to the body – the snake’s body, the reader’s body – because that is where the argument begins. Snakes are not ideas. They are organisms. And organisms, when you look closely enough, carry their own philosophy.
Greene’s structure is as deliberate as his style. The book is divided into three parts – “Lifestyles,” “Diversity,” “Synthesis” – a movement from how snakes live, to how many ways they have found to live, to what that variety reveals about evolution, history, and our current moment of ecological narrowing. This architecture matters because it keeps the reader from confusing knowledge with mere naming. A lesser book might rely on the narcotic of taxonomy: lists, lineages, the soft pleasure of cataloging. Greene’s taxonomy never forgets the animal inside the label. Classification is presented as a tool for asking better questions, not as a substitute for wonder.
Part One, “Lifestyles,” is where Greene quietly rearranges the reader’s assumptions. The opening chapter, on classification and general biology, does not behave like the dutiful throat-clearing of many natural histories. It is a manifesto about what counts as perception. Greene foregrounds the chemical world – forked tongues, the vomeronasal organ, the elaborate grammar of scent trails and molecular signatures – and in doing so he forces the visually oriented reader to accept a demotion. The snake, in his telling, lives in a reality we can barely imagine: an atmosphere thick with information that cannot be “seen,” only tasted. The effect is disorienting in a productive way. You begin to sense how much human confidence is an artifact of our favored senses, and how quickly confidence collapses when the world is measured by other means.
This is also the chapter in which Greene’s evolutionary conscience is most visible. He refuses to define snakes merely by limblessness or by the dramatic act of swallowing large prey, because those are traits that evolved unevenly and recur elsewhere in the vertebrate world. His attention is on the origins of snakehood: the anatomical and behavioral innovations that allowed an elongate predator to become not a curiosity, but a successful, global lineage. He takes pleasure in details most people have been trained to avoid: the staggered internal organs of a tubular body, the absence of a urinary bladder, the paired hemipenes and their odd mechanics, the cloacal scent glands that hint at a hidden defensive repertoire. In Greene’s hands, these are not grotesqueries but adaptations. The grotesque is revealed, instead, as a reaction we impose on what refuses to flatter our preferences.
In “Locomotion and Habitats,” he turns a single verb – slither – into an embarrassment. The book patiently distinguishes the major modes of snake movement, showing how each is tuned to substrate and circumstance: the controlled traction of lateral undulation, the slow conveyor-belt of rectilinear motion, the angular geometry of sidewinding on sand, the compressed effort of concertina movement in tight spaces. Here Greene’s prose has a sensuous, almost sculptural attentiveness. Movement becomes a form of biography. A snake’s gait is not a trick; it is the visible expression of a body negotiating friction, gravity, cover, and risk. The chapter’s tour of habitats – forest canopies, deserts, burrows, rivers, oceans – produces a quiet corrective to the cultural stereotype of snakes as marginal creatures. They are everywhere. The surprise is not their scarcity but our selective blindness.
“Diet and Feeding” deepens Greene’s method: he makes a sensational subject un-sensational by explaining it. The miracle of cranial kinesis – that mobile architecture of bones and ligaments that allows many snakes to engulf prey that seems impossibly large – is described not as circus feat but as evolutionary compromise. Feeding is risky. A large meal immobilizes a snake, exposes it, makes it temporarily clumsy in a world full of enemies. Greene is especially good at turning physiology into a meditation on time. Snakes eat infrequently, sometimes dramatically, and then they wait – digesting, hiding, conserving. In a culture addicted to constant activity, the snake’s economy can read as eerie. Greene makes it read as intelligent.
The chapter on venom and snakebite is where the book’s ethical steadiness becomes unmistakable. Greene neither revels in danger nor denies it. He keeps returning to a simple, bracing proposition: venom is primarily a tool for subduing prey. Defensive biting exists, but it is not a moral act; it is a contingency of being cornered by something enormous. Greene writes about snakebite with a seriousness that acknowledges human suffering and the global inequities of medical access, while also resisting the melodramatic habit of turning snakes into malicious antagonists. The reader who wants a villain will be disappointed. The reader who wants to understand why fear persists – even when risk is statistically rare – will find the book quietly illuminating.
“Predators and Defense” offers an even more important reversal. Most people meet snakes in the imagination as predators. Greene insists, repeatedly, that snakes are also prey – often very vulnerable prey – and that much of their behavior makes sense only when you watch them from the perspective of being eaten. The repertoire of defenses becomes a kind of evolutionary literature: camouflage as silence, mimicry as borrowed authority, bluff as theater, strike as last resort. Greene’s attention to these strategies has the feel of moral education, though he never announces it as such. He is teaching the reader to interpret an animal’s apparent “aggression” as desperation or deterrence, and to notice how quickly humans misread caution as hostility.
By the end of Part One, the reader has acquired not only information but a new posture of attention. Greene’s chapter-opening essays – short, reflective pieces that recur like a refrain – contribute to this posture. They create a space in which science and art are not competing claims but parallel routes toward meaning. The epigraphs, drawn from writers like Camus and Neruda, are not decorative flourishes. They signal Greene’s commitment to an old but increasingly rare ambition: to write natural history that is accurate without being sterile, and literary without being vague.
Part Two, “Diversity,” is the book’s long walk through the evolutionary forest. It begins underground, with blindsnakes – those small, polished, secretive specialists whose lives unfold largely out of human sight. Greene treats them as a reminder that biodiversity is not only what we notice; it is also what our habits of noticing exclude. From there the book moves through basal lineages and into the great sprawl of advanced snakes, where diversity becomes almost an argument in itself. The effect of this section is cumulative. Names and forms pile up until the reader begins to feel how inadequate a single emotional response – fear, fascination, disgust – is to contain the group.
Greene is careful to turn diversity into more than a parade. He repeatedly ties lineages to ecological problems: how to eat certain prey, how to live in certain substrates, how to move through particular environments, how to avoid particular predators. Some snakes specialize so narrowly they appear almost implausible – egg-eaters with anatomical solutions that feel like engineering, burrowers whose bodies are tuned to soil like drills, arboreal species that glide through canopy spaces most humans never inhabit long enough to notice. Other snakes are broad opportunists, living proofs that flexibility can be as powerful as specialization. Greene’s writing keeps emphasizing the logic of constraint: evolution does not design perfection, it refines what works, again and again, under varying pressures.
His chapters on the major venomous lineages – elapids and vipers – are especially instructive in this regard. Cobras and their relatives are presented not merely as venom delivery systems but as behaviors, as tactics, as animals that negotiate risk with displays and decisions. Vipers, so often reduced to a cultural icon of treachery, emerge as energy economists: sit-and-wait predators whose power lies in patience, concealment, and efficiency. Greene’s fascination with venom never becomes fetish. He treats it as one element in a broader ecological story.
The marine chapter – seakraits and seasnakes – is a brief reminder of how far snakes have gone, evolutionarily, into improbable worlds. A lineage that began as a terrestrial, limbed ancestor ends up in open water, breeding and feeding in environments that demand profound physiological and behavioral innovation. Greene does not overstate the drama because the drama is already there. He simply points, describes, and lets the reader feel the strangeness of it.
Throughout, the photographs by Michael and Patricia Fogden function as more than illustration. They insist on snakes as beings in place: patterned bodies in foliage, angled heads in desert light, coiled forms that look like fragments of landscape until they move. The images share Greene’s ethic of attention – they avoid the sterile museum portrait and instead render the animal as a participant in habitat. The book becomes, in this way, a collaboration between two kinds of seeing: the analytical eye of the biologist and the compositional eye of the photographer. Together they build an argument for aesthetic value as a form of conservation.
Part Three, “Synthesis,” is where Greene allows the book’s philosophical current to become explicit. Evolution and biogeography are treated not as an obligatory final chapter but as the deep grammar behind everything that came before. The fossil record is partial, the timing of divergences often uncertain, and Greene is candid about what remains unknown. This candor is one of the book’s strengths. It models a scientific temperament that is not embarrassed by uncertainty but disciplined by it. The story of snakes becomes, here, a story about how we infer history from fragments: bones, distributions, relationships, traits. Deep time enters the narrative not as an abstract horizon but as the pressure that shaped the very possibilities of snake life.
Then comes the book’s moral culmination: snakes and others, past and present, their futures caught in our present. Greene’s conservation argument is not sentimental and not merely ethical. It is biological. Many snakes live slow lives, mature late, reproduce at rates that cannot quickly compensate for sudden mortality or habitat fragmentation. Persecution compounds the problem. The human tendency to kill what frightens us – often indiscriminately, often casually – becomes, in Greene’s pages, less a personal failing than a cultural habit with evolutionary consequences. The book does not ask for affection. It asks for restraint, for knowledge, for the humility to let an animal be what it is without demanding that it justify itself in human terms.
The Epilogue, “Why Snakes?,” draws together the book’s two strands: the scientific and the reflective. Greene’s answer is not a slogan. It is a stance toward the world. Snakes matter because they are a test case for our capacity to value what does not mirror us. They do not offer fur, expressive faces, or the easy empathy of human-like gestures. They offer otherness – disciplined, ancient, sometimes dangerous, often beautiful – and they force us to confront the limits of our own interpretive comfort.
A review faithful to Greene’s seriousness must also register the book’s costs. “Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature” can be dense, especially in the long survey of Part Two, where the accumulation of detail may overwhelm readers who want narrative momentum. Greene’s love for the intricacies of systematics sometimes carries him into passages that feel more like an advanced lecture than an essay meant to be read straight through. And because the book is rooted in the science of its time, some frameworks inevitably carry the patina of the late 1990s. None of this undoes the book’s value, but it does shape the reading experience: this is not a quick pleasure, and it does not always offer the streamlined ease of more overtly popular natural history.
Still, the larger effect is unmistakable. Greene has written a book that refuses to choose between fact and feeling. It insists that accurate knowledge can deepen wonder rather than dilute it, and that wonder is not the enemy of rigor but its companion. In a culture that tends to swing between sentimentalizing nature and exploiting it, Greene offers a third way: to look closely, to accept complexity, to acknowledge fear without being ruled by it.
When the book closes, one is left with a sensation that is difficult to name – something like respect, something like grief, something like the uneasy joy of realizing that the world contains forms of life that do not need our approval to be profound. “Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature” is a work of science written with the patience of literature, and literature grounded in the discipline of science. It is not perfect, but it is rare, and it lingers. My rating, offered in that spirit, is 82 out of 100.
The book’s first achievement is tonal. Greene writes in a register that is both intimate and exacting, as though a field notebook had learned to sing without losing its measurements. He can give you the technical scaffolding of a skull and, on the next page, the sensation of humidity in a lowland forest, the sudden electric clarity of seeing an animal that has spent most of its life being misseen. His sentences lean into metaphor, but they do not escape into it. The prose keeps returning to the body – the snake’s body, the reader’s body – because that is where the argument begins. Snakes are not ideas. They are organisms. And organisms, when you look closely enough, carry their own philosophy.
Greene’s structure is as deliberate as his style. The book is divided into three parts – “Lifestyles,” “Diversity,” “Synthesis” – a movement from how snakes live, to how many ways they have found to live, to what that variety reveals about evolution, history, and our current moment of ecological narrowing. This architecture matters because it keeps the reader from confusing knowledge with mere naming. A lesser book might rely on the narcotic of taxonomy: lists, lineages, the soft pleasure of cataloging. Greene’s taxonomy never forgets the animal inside the label. Classification is presented as a tool for asking better questions, not as a substitute for wonder.
Part One, “Lifestyles,” is where Greene quietly rearranges the reader’s assumptions. The opening chapter, on classification and general biology, does not behave like the dutiful throat-clearing of many natural histories. It is a manifesto about what counts as perception. Greene foregrounds the chemical world – forked tongues, the vomeronasal organ, the elaborate grammar of scent trails and molecular signatures – and in doing so he forces the visually oriented reader to accept a demotion. The snake, in his telling, lives in a reality we can barely imagine: an atmosphere thick with information that cannot be “seen,” only tasted. The effect is disorienting in a productive way. You begin to sense how much human confidence is an artifact of our favored senses, and how quickly confidence collapses when the world is measured by other means.
This is also the chapter in which Greene’s evolutionary conscience is most visible. He refuses to define snakes merely by limblessness or by the dramatic act of swallowing large prey, because those are traits that evolved unevenly and recur elsewhere in the vertebrate world. His attention is on the origins of snakehood: the anatomical and behavioral innovations that allowed an elongate predator to become not a curiosity, but a successful, global lineage. He takes pleasure in details most people have been trained to avoid: the staggered internal organs of a tubular body, the absence of a urinary bladder, the paired hemipenes and their odd mechanics, the cloacal scent glands that hint at a hidden defensive repertoire. In Greene’s hands, these are not grotesqueries but adaptations. The grotesque is revealed, instead, as a reaction we impose on what refuses to flatter our preferences.
In “Locomotion and Habitats,” he turns a single verb – slither – into an embarrassment. The book patiently distinguishes the major modes of snake movement, showing how each is tuned to substrate and circumstance: the controlled traction of lateral undulation, the slow conveyor-belt of rectilinear motion, the angular geometry of sidewinding on sand, the compressed effort of concertina movement in tight spaces. Here Greene’s prose has a sensuous, almost sculptural attentiveness. Movement becomes a form of biography. A snake’s gait is not a trick; it is the visible expression of a body negotiating friction, gravity, cover, and risk. The chapter’s tour of habitats – forest canopies, deserts, burrows, rivers, oceans – produces a quiet corrective to the cultural stereotype of snakes as marginal creatures. They are everywhere. The surprise is not their scarcity but our selective blindness.
“Diet and Feeding” deepens Greene’s method: he makes a sensational subject un-sensational by explaining it. The miracle of cranial kinesis – that mobile architecture of bones and ligaments that allows many snakes to engulf prey that seems impossibly large – is described not as circus feat but as evolutionary compromise. Feeding is risky. A large meal immobilizes a snake, exposes it, makes it temporarily clumsy in a world full of enemies. Greene is especially good at turning physiology into a meditation on time. Snakes eat infrequently, sometimes dramatically, and then they wait – digesting, hiding, conserving. In a culture addicted to constant activity, the snake’s economy can read as eerie. Greene makes it read as intelligent.
The chapter on venom and snakebite is where the book’s ethical steadiness becomes unmistakable. Greene neither revels in danger nor denies it. He keeps returning to a simple, bracing proposition: venom is primarily a tool for subduing prey. Defensive biting exists, but it is not a moral act; it is a contingency of being cornered by something enormous. Greene writes about snakebite with a seriousness that acknowledges human suffering and the global inequities of medical access, while also resisting the melodramatic habit of turning snakes into malicious antagonists. The reader who wants a villain will be disappointed. The reader who wants to understand why fear persists – even when risk is statistically rare – will find the book quietly illuminating.
“Predators and Defense” offers an even more important reversal. Most people meet snakes in the imagination as predators. Greene insists, repeatedly, that snakes are also prey – often very vulnerable prey – and that much of their behavior makes sense only when you watch them from the perspective of being eaten. The repertoire of defenses becomes a kind of evolutionary literature: camouflage as silence, mimicry as borrowed authority, bluff as theater, strike as last resort. Greene’s attention to these strategies has the feel of moral education, though he never announces it as such. He is teaching the reader to interpret an animal’s apparent “aggression” as desperation or deterrence, and to notice how quickly humans misread caution as hostility.
By the end of Part One, the reader has acquired not only information but a new posture of attention. Greene’s chapter-opening essays – short, reflective pieces that recur like a refrain – contribute to this posture. They create a space in which science and art are not competing claims but parallel routes toward meaning. The epigraphs, drawn from writers like Camus and Neruda, are not decorative flourishes. They signal Greene’s commitment to an old but increasingly rare ambition: to write natural history that is accurate without being sterile, and literary without being vague.
Part Two, “Diversity,” is the book’s long walk through the evolutionary forest. It begins underground, with blindsnakes – those small, polished, secretive specialists whose lives unfold largely out of human sight. Greene treats them as a reminder that biodiversity is not only what we notice; it is also what our habits of noticing exclude. From there the book moves through basal lineages and into the great sprawl of advanced snakes, where diversity becomes almost an argument in itself. The effect of this section is cumulative. Names and forms pile up until the reader begins to feel how inadequate a single emotional response – fear, fascination, disgust – is to contain the group.
Greene is careful to turn diversity into more than a parade. He repeatedly ties lineages to ecological problems: how to eat certain prey, how to live in certain substrates, how to move through particular environments, how to avoid particular predators. Some snakes specialize so narrowly they appear almost implausible – egg-eaters with anatomical solutions that feel like engineering, burrowers whose bodies are tuned to soil like drills, arboreal species that glide through canopy spaces most humans never inhabit long enough to notice. Other snakes are broad opportunists, living proofs that flexibility can be as powerful as specialization. Greene’s writing keeps emphasizing the logic of constraint: evolution does not design perfection, it refines what works, again and again, under varying pressures.
His chapters on the major venomous lineages – elapids and vipers – are especially instructive in this regard. Cobras and their relatives are presented not merely as venom delivery systems but as behaviors, as tactics, as animals that negotiate risk with displays and decisions. Vipers, so often reduced to a cultural icon of treachery, emerge as energy economists: sit-and-wait predators whose power lies in patience, concealment, and efficiency. Greene’s fascination with venom never becomes fetish. He treats it as one element in a broader ecological story.
The marine chapter – seakraits and seasnakes – is a brief reminder of how far snakes have gone, evolutionarily, into improbable worlds. A lineage that began as a terrestrial, limbed ancestor ends up in open water, breeding and feeding in environments that demand profound physiological and behavioral innovation. Greene does not overstate the drama because the drama is already there. He simply points, describes, and lets the reader feel the strangeness of it.
Throughout, the photographs by Michael and Patricia Fogden function as more than illustration. They insist on snakes as beings in place: patterned bodies in foliage, angled heads in desert light, coiled forms that look like fragments of landscape until they move. The images share Greene’s ethic of attention – they avoid the sterile museum portrait and instead render the animal as a participant in habitat. The book becomes, in this way, a collaboration between two kinds of seeing: the analytical eye of the biologist and the compositional eye of the photographer. Together they build an argument for aesthetic value as a form of conservation.
Part Three, “Synthesis,” is where Greene allows the book’s philosophical current to become explicit. Evolution and biogeography are treated not as an obligatory final chapter but as the deep grammar behind everything that came before. The fossil record is partial, the timing of divergences often uncertain, and Greene is candid about what remains unknown. This candor is one of the book’s strengths. It models a scientific temperament that is not embarrassed by uncertainty but disciplined by it. The story of snakes becomes, here, a story about how we infer history from fragments: bones, distributions, relationships, traits. Deep time enters the narrative not as an abstract horizon but as the pressure that shaped the very possibilities of snake life.
Then comes the book’s moral culmination: snakes and others, past and present, their futures caught in our present. Greene’s conservation argument is not sentimental and not merely ethical. It is biological. Many snakes live slow lives, mature late, reproduce at rates that cannot quickly compensate for sudden mortality or habitat fragmentation. Persecution compounds the problem. The human tendency to kill what frightens us – often indiscriminately, often casually – becomes, in Greene’s pages, less a personal failing than a cultural habit with evolutionary consequences. The book does not ask for affection. It asks for restraint, for knowledge, for the humility to let an animal be what it is without demanding that it justify itself in human terms.
The Epilogue, “Why Snakes?,” draws together the book’s two strands: the scientific and the reflective. Greene’s answer is not a slogan. It is a stance toward the world. Snakes matter because they are a test case for our capacity to value what does not mirror us. They do not offer fur, expressive faces, or the easy empathy of human-like gestures. They offer otherness – disciplined, ancient, sometimes dangerous, often beautiful – and they force us to confront the limits of our own interpretive comfort.
A review faithful to Greene’s seriousness must also register the book’s costs. “Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature” can be dense, especially in the long survey of Part Two, where the accumulation of detail may overwhelm readers who want narrative momentum. Greene’s love for the intricacies of systematics sometimes carries him into passages that feel more like an advanced lecture than an essay meant to be read straight through. And because the book is rooted in the science of its time, some frameworks inevitably carry the patina of the late 1990s. None of this undoes the book’s value, but it does shape the reading experience: this is not a quick pleasure, and it does not always offer the streamlined ease of more overtly popular natural history.
Still, the larger effect is unmistakable. Greene has written a book that refuses to choose between fact and feeling. It insists that accurate knowledge can deepen wonder rather than dilute it, and that wonder is not the enemy of rigor but its companion. In a culture that tends to swing between sentimentalizing nature and exploiting it, Greene offers a third way: to look closely, to accept complexity, to acknowledge fear without being ruled by it.
When the book closes, one is left with a sensation that is difficult to name – something like respect, something like grief, something like the uneasy joy of realizing that the world contains forms of life that do not need our approval to be profound. “Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature” is a work of science written with the patience of literature, and literature grounded in the discipline of science. It is not perfect, but it is rare, and it lingers. My rating, offered in that spirit, is 82 out of 100.
August 1, 2011
1998 PEN Center USA Award Winner for Research Nonfiction
March 21, 2024
The library's copy is somewhat damaged in the spine so I am momentarily deciding between paperback and hardcover... I have been told when I asked around that this scholar has particular clout in this field.
It looks as though alea iacta est I may want a PB for myself.
It looks as though alea iacta est I may want a PB for myself.
December 28, 2021
A classic book on the evolution and diversity of snakes, interspersed with personal essays by the author.
Read
January 2, 2026bratz-cade
November 29, 2010
“Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature” is the combination of a glossy coffee table book coupled with detailed scientific text.
First of all, the photos are outstanding and easily the best part of the book. Care was taken to photograph snakes in their natural habitats and they definitely do justice to the beauty of these reptiles (as a bit of a caution, a few of the feeding photos are not for the squeamish). The photographers, Michael and Patricia Fogden, both have doctorates in zoology, which I suspect helps them obtain such great pictures that illustrate not just the animals, but their behavior as well. Their website may be found at: http://www.fogdenphotos.com/dbm.html
The text (written by Harry W. Greene, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University) is informative and covers all aspects of snake physiology, evolution, diet, locomotion, reproduction, behavior and habitat. My main criticism of the book is that Greene appears to be writing for his colleagues as opposed to the general public. As a result the text is dry, densely worded and replete with scientific terms which he fails to take the time to define, assuming the reader is well versed in graduate level biology. Greene’s paragraphs also tend to read like a grocery list (an analogy that only works if you were shopping for snakes, I suppose): snake ‘w’ eats frogs, snake ‘x’ eats eggs, snake ‘y’ eats ants, snake ‘z’ eats lizards, etc. There is some good information to be found, but it’s a bit of a chore to plow through.
First of all, the photos are outstanding and easily the best part of the book. Care was taken to photograph snakes in their natural habitats and they definitely do justice to the beauty of these reptiles (as a bit of a caution, a few of the feeding photos are not for the squeamish). The photographers, Michael and Patricia Fogden, both have doctorates in zoology, which I suspect helps them obtain such great pictures that illustrate not just the animals, but their behavior as well. Their website may be found at: http://www.fogdenphotos.com/dbm.html
The text (written by Harry W. Greene, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University) is informative and covers all aspects of snake physiology, evolution, diet, locomotion, reproduction, behavior and habitat. My main criticism of the book is that Greene appears to be writing for his colleagues as opposed to the general public. As a result the text is dry, densely worded and replete with scientific terms which he fails to take the time to define, assuming the reader is well versed in graduate level biology. Greene’s paragraphs also tend to read like a grocery list (an analogy that only works if you were shopping for snakes, I suppose): snake ‘w’ eats frogs, snake ‘x’ eats eggs, snake ‘y’ eats ants, snake ‘z’ eats lizards, etc. There is some good information to be found, but it’s a bit of a chore to plow through.
September 1, 2008
Great photos!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews