Lizard

Animal Series

by Boria Sax

Our storybooks are full of lizards, but we usually call them something else—dragons, serpents, dinosaurs or monsters. These stories vastly increase their size, bestow wings upon them, make them exhale flame, and endow them with magical powers. Lizards stimulate the human imagination unlike most other animals, despite generally being small, soundless, and hidden from sight in burrows, treetops, and crevices. They can blend into a vast range of environments, from rocky coasts to deserts to rain forests. Their fluid motion can make us think of water, while their curvilinear form suggests vegetation. Their stillness suggests death, while their sudden arousal is like resurrection.

This delightful book gives lizards their due, demonstrating how the story of lizards is interwoven with the history of human imagination. Boria Sax considers the lizard as a sensual being—a symbol, a myth, a product of evolution and an aesthetic form. He describes the diversity of lizards and traces the representation of the reptile in cultures including those of pre-conquest Australia, the Quiché Maya, Mughal India, and central Africa. Illustrated throughout with beguiling images, Lizard is a unique and often surprising introduction to a popular but little-understood reptile.

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2017

About the author

A person is not a list of accomplishments, and so I prefer not to introduce myself in that way. It is more accurate to say each of us is a collection of stories. Like others, I have more stories than I could ever tell or even know. I have been, among other things, a human rights activist, an impoverished poet, a manual worker, an expert on online education, and a pioneer in Animal Studies.

I was raised on Communism, the grandest of grand narratives. it sought to explain everything but didn’t explain anything very well. I have always missed its dramatic sweep. I wanted big answers for the big questions. I wouldn’t accept the little ones and kept getting in trouble with my teachers.

My father had been a Soviet spy, passing atomic secrets, and the initial years of my life were spent with my nearly destitute family trying to shake the FBI by moving many times a year. My father, a Russian Jew, was impulsive, brilliant, loving, abusive, and seriously mentally ill. My mother, coming from a rather puritanical British background, saw him as a romantic rebel. She was drawn to the Civil Rights movement and was a co-founder of CORE (the Congress on Racial Equality), but the difficulties of survival overwhelmed her idealism. She held our family together with a sort of everyday heroism, and my parents divorced after 18 tempestuous years.

Rather than focusing exclusively on any specialty, I like to draw analogies between domains that appear very far apart. In the 1980s, when I began to write about literature, I was disappointed to discover that I had to spend far more time sorting through commentaries than with poems and stories. The topic of animals in literature and folklore was, however, relatively new. Browsing in used bookshops, I came across eighteenth and nineteenth century encyclopedias of animals, which were an uncharted world of comedy and romance, filled with turkeys that speak Arabic, beavers that build like architects, and dogs that solve murders. They revealed every bit as much about human society as about birds and beasts.

I started writing mostly about human-animal relations and never stopped. Indulging my fondness for paradoxes, I addressed subjects like Nazi animal protection, the modernity of the ravens in the Tower of London, and the Thanksgiving turkey as a sacrificial offering. As for trees, I think of them as just a kind of animal. By now, I have published roughly twenty books, which have been translated into many languages. I often violate academic protocols, not only by addressing broad themes but also by inserting humor and lyricism into my texts. I teach in the college program of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility and the graduate literature program of Mercy University.

There have been two constants in my somewhat untidy life. One is the support of my wife Linda, who has been with me over half a century and whom I cannot thank enough. The other is my writing, which I have worked on continually but am unable to judge. Thanks, reader, for reading this, and I hope you are inspired to read more.

Reviews

[Margaret · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having read the book in the series on Hedgehogs by Hugh Warwick I was anticipating something as joyful and full of love as that. What I got was a small volume that was dry, dull, and sterile.

The subject matter was interesting, but the writer did not appear to be that involved in what he was writing about.

[Boria Sax · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost all of us have “informal theories,” ideas that cannot quite be parsed in academic terms yet help to organize our thinking. One of mine is that every sort of animal corresponds to something in the human psyche. For wolves and tigers, that is something frightening and glamorous. For swans, that is mysterious, beautiful and sad. For the most part, lizards seem to lack the charisma of those animals, yet, on a largely unconscious level, we respond to their blend of fierceness and melancholy. Otherwise, why would we constantly make lizards into dragons? Why would we vastly exaggerate their size, and then bestow uncanny abilities, like breathing fire, upon them? I address these questions in my book Lizard, a history of relationships between lizards and human beings.

[M]

I liked it in the beginning and found some interesting facts in it, but I feel like it’s more about how humans perceive lizards (through art, imagination, depictions) rather than lizards themselves. If you’re curious about actual lizards, I don’t know if this is the book for you.


"Lizards even take on the colours that surround them, and they are sensually attuned to every motion or change in their vicinity. They lie so still that they can almost be mistaken for vegetation, yet they can react instantaneously if an insect comes in range. Lizards are a great many things that we are not, and that is why they fascinate us."

[parth shah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a nice starting point to get started in the world of lizards. Touches upon the topic from various different angles such as culture, history, societal image, art, mythology and not just biology. Good read :)

[Sayre · Rating 3 out of 5]

some interesting facts but some wishy washy writing and iffy art history
great images, esp historical images of depictions of lizards