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The Book of Snakes: A Life-Size Guide to Six Hundred Species from Around the World
“A rich introduction to the snake world” filled with spectacular color photos and fascinating facts about six hundred different species (The Wall Street Journal). For millennia, humans have regarded snakes with an exceptional combination of fascination and revulsion. Some people recoil in fear at the very suggestion of these creatures, while others happily keep them as pets. Snakes can convey both beauty and menace in a single tongue flick and have held a special place in our cultures. Yet, for as many meanings that we attribute to snakes—from fertility and birth to sin and death—the real-life species represent an even wider array of wonders. The Book of Snakes presents 600 species from around the world, representing about one-sixth of all snake species. It brings greater understanding of a group of reptiles that have existed for over 160 million years, and that now inhabit every continent except Antarctica, as well as two of the great oceans. This first-of-its-kind volume pairs spectacular photos with easy-to-digest text. Entries include close-ups of the snake’s head and a section of the snake at actual size. The detailed images allow readers to examine the intricate scale patterns and rainbow of colors, as well as special features like a cobra’s hood or a rattlesnake’s rattle. The text is written for laypeople and includes a glossary of frequently used terms. Herpetologists and herpetoculturists alike will delight in this collection—and even those with a more cautious stance on snakes will find themselves drawn in by the wild diversity of the suborder Serpentes. “A masterpiece.” —Ichthyology & Herpetology
649 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 15, 2018
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224 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 5, 2020
Excellent, but not perfect.
The book contains photos of numerous rare snakes that I’ve never seen pictures of, and the photos are seldom worse than great. Unfortunately there’s only one photo per entry, and I wish more subtypes were included (the three major types of short-tailed python all look very different).
Unfortunately some of the entries were wrong (wrong photo/snake), and the descriptions were too short, leading to many being quite repetitive.
I’d have also liked more illustrations or images of special things - like how the fangs of stiletto snakes work.
To be clear, these are quibbles and only relevant as to why it doesn’t get five stars. I’d highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the subject.
The book contains photos of numerous rare snakes that I’ve never seen pictures of, and the photos are seldom worse than great. Unfortunately there’s only one photo per entry, and I wish more subtypes were included (the three major types of short-tailed python all look very different).
Unfortunately some of the entries were wrong (wrong photo/snake), and the descriptions were too short, leading to many being quite repetitive.
I’d have also liked more illustrations or images of special things - like how the fangs of stiletto snakes work.
To be clear, these are quibbles and only relevant as to why it doesn’t get five stars. I’d highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the subject.
December 18, 2025
There is a particular kind of book that arrives disguised as an object – handsome, hefty, quietly commanding shelf space – yet is, at heart, an argument about attention. “The Book of Snakes” is that kind of book. It wears its abundance openly: hundreds of species rendered at life size, a world’s worth of pattern and posture and scale. But Mark O’Shea’s deeper project is less about quantity than about recalibration. He is trying, patiently and without theatrics, to adjust the reader’s internal scale – to move snakes out of the realm of reflex and into the realm of proportion.
The opening chapters proceed like a guided unlearning. O’Shea begins where many readers actually live: in the polarizing instant of recognition, when the mind supplies a story before the eye has even finished seeing. The snake is one of the few animals that can still provoke a near-mythic response in a modern setting, as if its body arrives trailing ancient meanings. O’Shea does not mock that response, nor does he indulge it. He describes the physical cues that make snakes feel uncanny – the smooth continuity of motion, the unblinking gaze, the tongue’s constant sampling of air – and then does something that feels increasingly rare in popular natural history: he slows down. His prose steadies itself around the animal. He asks the reader to look again, not harder, but more accurately.
From there, the book’s structure unfurls with a clarity that has its own persuasive force. “Evolution & diversity of snakes” and “What is a snake?” establish the foundational terms: the long engineering of a body plan, the radical innovations of skull and jaw, the sensory architecture that allows a creature without external ears to read a world of vibration and chemical trace. O’Shea is especially good at describing complexity without showing off. He does not treat evolution as a triumphalist ladder, nor anatomy as a museum label. The effect is not a lecture but a gradual illumination – the sense that what has been dismissed as mere leglessness is, in fact, an alternative design philosophy, refined by deep time and constant constraint.
In these chapters, O’Shea’s defining impulse is to replace popular myths with better metaphors. A snake does not “dislocate” its jaw – it is built to flex, to widen, to advance its mouth in coordinated increments, as if swallowing were a kind of choreography rather than a grotesque stunt. A snake is not “primitive” because it is elongated – it is specialized, and its specializations have consequences: internal organs arranged along a narrow corridor, metabolism capable of long austerity, locomotion that is not one motion but several, each suited to a different surface and predicament. The book’s pedagogical strength lies in this insistence that strangeness is not an absence but a different arrangement of presence.
“Prey & hunting” and “Enemies & defense” form the book’s central hinge – two chapters that, placed back-to-back, produce a more complete portrait than either could alone. If the popular imagination casts snakes as relentless threats, O’Shea quietly repositions them as careful negotiators of risk. Hunting becomes an economy of effort. The strike is not rage, but efficiency. Constriction is explained without melodrama, and venom is treated as biology rather than moral symbol: metabolically costly, deployed selectively, evolved for prey capture and only secondarily useful for defense. A snake’s world is revealed as a set of constraints – every encounter with prey carries the possibility of injury, every visible moment carries the possibility of becoming prey.
This is where O’Shea’s tone matters. He writes as someone who has lived around snakes long enough to respect their capacities without projecting onto them a personality. His descriptions resist the easy slide into anthropomorphism. Fear is acknowledged as real, even reasonable, and then made less sovereign. What emerges is the snake as a creature that often prefers not to be in conflict at all. The bluff display, the hiss, the sudden flattening of the body – these are not declarations of dominance but attempts at distance. The book is most persuasive when it insists that the most characteristic snake behavior is avoidance. Even the bite, in O’Shea’s rendering, is frequently a last resort – and even then, the animal’s physiology carries the imprint of scarcity and cost.
“Reproductive strategies” continues this ethic of unsentimental clarity. Here, too, O’Shea avoids the temptation to narrativize. He describes the range of solutions – egg-laying and live birth, seasonal timing, the ecological logic that makes internal gestation advantageous in colder climates – without turning biology into a morality play. What is striking is how well he keeps the reader oriented. Reproduction becomes another site of trade-off: energy invested upfront rather than in extended parental care, offspring built for early independence, survival outsourced to probability. The chapter leaves you with the sense that snakes persist not through tenderness but through fit – an alignment between body, environment, and timing that feels as exact as it is impersonal.
The first part of the book culminates in “Snakes & humankind,” which could easily have become either a scolding or a sentimental plea. O’Shea chooses neither. He traces the ancient symbolic burden humans place on snakes – wisdom and renewal, danger and temptation – and shows how those symbols can translate into real outcomes, including fear-driven killing and ecological misunderstanding. He touches, too, on the quiet irony of venom: an object of dread that has also been a reservoir for human medicine and scientific insight. The chapter’s strength is its refusal to inflate. The human relationship with snakes is presented as complicated, historically saturated, and often cruel by accident – a chain of cultural meanings that drags behind the animal’s body like a shadow that does not belong to it.
Up to this point, “The Book of Snakes” reads like a carefully constructed argument: snakes are not what the panic story says they are; they are both more intricate and more ordinary, both more dangerous and less personally threatening, than the myths allow. Then the book shifts – and reveals its second identity.
“The Snakes,” the massive life-size reference section, is not merely an appendix. It is the book’s gravitational center. Here, O’Shea moves from explanation to presentation, from narrative to catalog, and the effect is almost architectural. Species after species appears as a unit of attention: pattern, form, scale, distribution, the body as a record of habitat. Organized by major evolutionary groupings, the section offers an experience of diversity that is harder to grasp in the abstract. You begin to feel how many different ways a snake can be a snake – how a shared body plan can branch into a near-infinite variety of solutions. Even readers who come for the spectacle of life-size images may find themselves, page by page, learning a subtler literacy: the difference between a pattern meant to vanish and one meant to warn, between a head shape designed for a burrow and one designed for a strike.
The strongest argument the book makes, ultimately, may be structural. O’Shea’s opening chapters train you in the kind of thinking that the catalog then rewards. Evolution becomes not an origin story but a set of constraints shaping form. Behavior becomes legible as adaptation rather than attitude. Defense becomes a language, prey capture a calculation. The species accounts, in turn, retroactively deepen the earlier prose. They show, concretely, what it means for diversity to accumulate without the flamboyant morphological divergence we expect in birds or mammals. In snakes, difference often lives in details: in the arrangement of scales, in the angle of a head, in a coloration that is less decoration than strategy.
There are, however, costs to the book’s ambition. The catalog’s breadth is necessarily purchased with compression, and readers who want more ecological depth per species may occasionally feel the pinch: a desire for more context, more narrative texture, more of the living animal in motion rather than the animal as a specimen of form. This is not a failure so much as a limit built into the form. A life-size guide to hundreds of species cannot also be a full natural history for each of them. Yet the book’s very success can awaken a hunger it cannot always satisfy.
A second limitation is stylistic, and it is more a question of taste than craft. O’Shea’s voice is admirably restrained – lucid, controlled, allergic to sensationalism. The book rarely seeks the ecstatic sentence, the sudden risky metaphor, the flourish that might turn a good explanation into something unforgettable. For many readers, this will be a virtue, a relief. The steadiness encourages trust. But the book’s calm can, at times, feel like an intentional narrowing of emotional range. It is a book that prefers to persuade through accumulation and clarity rather than through intensity.
And “Snakes & humankind,” while thoughtful, sometimes stops just short of the harder edges of the present: the full ecological stakes of habitat loss, the pressures of climate and land-use change on snake populations, the systemic inequalities that shape snakebite risk and medical response. O’Shea gestures toward these realities, and his refusal to moralize may be part of his method – but the reader may still sense a door left only partially open.
None of this diminishes the book’s achievement as what it most clearly wants to be: a bridge between expertise and the general eye, a work that makes a global subject graspable without cheapening it. What lingers after reading is not simply a set of facts, but a recalibrated way of seeing. You begin to recognize how much of snake fear is a failure of scale – a mismatch between the mind’s inherited alarm and the animal’s actual place in the world. You also begin to sense, in the book’s patient voice, an ethic: not reverence exactly, and not affection, but a disciplined respect for what exists without needing our stories.
The best reference books do more than organize information. They change the user. They send you back into the world with altered perception, so that the next time you encounter the subject – in a photograph, in a museum case, in a flash of movement at the edge of a path – you meet it with more knowledge and less noise. In that sense, “The Book of Snakes” succeeds on two fronts at once: as an object of consultation and as a quiet instrument of reeducation. It is not trying to make snakes lovable. It is trying to make them legible. The result, for a reader willing to be taught how to look, is a book I would place at 85 out of 100 – confident, generous in scope, and, in its refusal to sensationalize, truer to its subject than most of what the snake has been made to mean.
The opening chapters proceed like a guided unlearning. O’Shea begins where many readers actually live: in the polarizing instant of recognition, when the mind supplies a story before the eye has even finished seeing. The snake is one of the few animals that can still provoke a near-mythic response in a modern setting, as if its body arrives trailing ancient meanings. O’Shea does not mock that response, nor does he indulge it. He describes the physical cues that make snakes feel uncanny – the smooth continuity of motion, the unblinking gaze, the tongue’s constant sampling of air – and then does something that feels increasingly rare in popular natural history: he slows down. His prose steadies itself around the animal. He asks the reader to look again, not harder, but more accurately.
From there, the book’s structure unfurls with a clarity that has its own persuasive force. “Evolution & diversity of snakes” and “What is a snake?” establish the foundational terms: the long engineering of a body plan, the radical innovations of skull and jaw, the sensory architecture that allows a creature without external ears to read a world of vibration and chemical trace. O’Shea is especially good at describing complexity without showing off. He does not treat evolution as a triumphalist ladder, nor anatomy as a museum label. The effect is not a lecture but a gradual illumination – the sense that what has been dismissed as mere leglessness is, in fact, an alternative design philosophy, refined by deep time and constant constraint.
In these chapters, O’Shea’s defining impulse is to replace popular myths with better metaphors. A snake does not “dislocate” its jaw – it is built to flex, to widen, to advance its mouth in coordinated increments, as if swallowing were a kind of choreography rather than a grotesque stunt. A snake is not “primitive” because it is elongated – it is specialized, and its specializations have consequences: internal organs arranged along a narrow corridor, metabolism capable of long austerity, locomotion that is not one motion but several, each suited to a different surface and predicament. The book’s pedagogical strength lies in this insistence that strangeness is not an absence but a different arrangement of presence.
“Prey & hunting” and “Enemies & defense” form the book’s central hinge – two chapters that, placed back-to-back, produce a more complete portrait than either could alone. If the popular imagination casts snakes as relentless threats, O’Shea quietly repositions them as careful negotiators of risk. Hunting becomes an economy of effort. The strike is not rage, but efficiency. Constriction is explained without melodrama, and venom is treated as biology rather than moral symbol: metabolically costly, deployed selectively, evolved for prey capture and only secondarily useful for defense. A snake’s world is revealed as a set of constraints – every encounter with prey carries the possibility of injury, every visible moment carries the possibility of becoming prey.
This is where O’Shea’s tone matters. He writes as someone who has lived around snakes long enough to respect their capacities without projecting onto them a personality. His descriptions resist the easy slide into anthropomorphism. Fear is acknowledged as real, even reasonable, and then made less sovereign. What emerges is the snake as a creature that often prefers not to be in conflict at all. The bluff display, the hiss, the sudden flattening of the body – these are not declarations of dominance but attempts at distance. The book is most persuasive when it insists that the most characteristic snake behavior is avoidance. Even the bite, in O’Shea’s rendering, is frequently a last resort – and even then, the animal’s physiology carries the imprint of scarcity and cost.
“Reproductive strategies” continues this ethic of unsentimental clarity. Here, too, O’Shea avoids the temptation to narrativize. He describes the range of solutions – egg-laying and live birth, seasonal timing, the ecological logic that makes internal gestation advantageous in colder climates – without turning biology into a morality play. What is striking is how well he keeps the reader oriented. Reproduction becomes another site of trade-off: energy invested upfront rather than in extended parental care, offspring built for early independence, survival outsourced to probability. The chapter leaves you with the sense that snakes persist not through tenderness but through fit – an alignment between body, environment, and timing that feels as exact as it is impersonal.
The first part of the book culminates in “Snakes & humankind,” which could easily have become either a scolding or a sentimental plea. O’Shea chooses neither. He traces the ancient symbolic burden humans place on snakes – wisdom and renewal, danger and temptation – and shows how those symbols can translate into real outcomes, including fear-driven killing and ecological misunderstanding. He touches, too, on the quiet irony of venom: an object of dread that has also been a reservoir for human medicine and scientific insight. The chapter’s strength is its refusal to inflate. The human relationship with snakes is presented as complicated, historically saturated, and often cruel by accident – a chain of cultural meanings that drags behind the animal’s body like a shadow that does not belong to it.
Up to this point, “The Book of Snakes” reads like a carefully constructed argument: snakes are not what the panic story says they are; they are both more intricate and more ordinary, both more dangerous and less personally threatening, than the myths allow. Then the book shifts – and reveals its second identity.
“The Snakes,” the massive life-size reference section, is not merely an appendix. It is the book’s gravitational center. Here, O’Shea moves from explanation to presentation, from narrative to catalog, and the effect is almost architectural. Species after species appears as a unit of attention: pattern, form, scale, distribution, the body as a record of habitat. Organized by major evolutionary groupings, the section offers an experience of diversity that is harder to grasp in the abstract. You begin to feel how many different ways a snake can be a snake – how a shared body plan can branch into a near-infinite variety of solutions. Even readers who come for the spectacle of life-size images may find themselves, page by page, learning a subtler literacy: the difference between a pattern meant to vanish and one meant to warn, between a head shape designed for a burrow and one designed for a strike.
The strongest argument the book makes, ultimately, may be structural. O’Shea’s opening chapters train you in the kind of thinking that the catalog then rewards. Evolution becomes not an origin story but a set of constraints shaping form. Behavior becomes legible as adaptation rather than attitude. Defense becomes a language, prey capture a calculation. The species accounts, in turn, retroactively deepen the earlier prose. They show, concretely, what it means for diversity to accumulate without the flamboyant morphological divergence we expect in birds or mammals. In snakes, difference often lives in details: in the arrangement of scales, in the angle of a head, in a coloration that is less decoration than strategy.
There are, however, costs to the book’s ambition. The catalog’s breadth is necessarily purchased with compression, and readers who want more ecological depth per species may occasionally feel the pinch: a desire for more context, more narrative texture, more of the living animal in motion rather than the animal as a specimen of form. This is not a failure so much as a limit built into the form. A life-size guide to hundreds of species cannot also be a full natural history for each of them. Yet the book’s very success can awaken a hunger it cannot always satisfy.
A second limitation is stylistic, and it is more a question of taste than craft. O’Shea’s voice is admirably restrained – lucid, controlled, allergic to sensationalism. The book rarely seeks the ecstatic sentence, the sudden risky metaphor, the flourish that might turn a good explanation into something unforgettable. For many readers, this will be a virtue, a relief. The steadiness encourages trust. But the book’s calm can, at times, feel like an intentional narrowing of emotional range. It is a book that prefers to persuade through accumulation and clarity rather than through intensity.
And “Snakes & humankind,” while thoughtful, sometimes stops just short of the harder edges of the present: the full ecological stakes of habitat loss, the pressures of climate and land-use change on snake populations, the systemic inequalities that shape snakebite risk and medical response. O’Shea gestures toward these realities, and his refusal to moralize may be part of his method – but the reader may still sense a door left only partially open.
None of this diminishes the book’s achievement as what it most clearly wants to be: a bridge between expertise and the general eye, a work that makes a global subject graspable without cheapening it. What lingers after reading is not simply a set of facts, but a recalibrated way of seeing. You begin to recognize how much of snake fear is a failure of scale – a mismatch between the mind’s inherited alarm and the animal’s actual place in the world. You also begin to sense, in the book’s patient voice, an ethic: not reverence exactly, and not affection, but a disciplined respect for what exists without needing our stories.
The best reference books do more than organize information. They change the user. They send you back into the world with altered perception, so that the next time you encounter the subject – in a photograph, in a museum case, in a flash of movement at the edge of a path – you meet it with more knowledge and less noise. In that sense, “The Book of Snakes” succeeds on two fronts at once: as an object of consultation and as a quiet instrument of reeducation. It is not trying to make snakes lovable. It is trying to make them legible. The result, for a reader willing to be taught how to look, is a book I would place at 85 out of 100 – confident, generous in scope, and, in its refusal to sensationalize, truer to its subject than most of what the snake has been made to mean.
June 20, 2021
Even though this book only covers 600 species of snakes (and I know there are a lot more species out there), but the information provided is really good. It describes all their habitats, behaviors, diets, subspecies, appearances or morphs with full colored photos. And yes, this review is biased cause I like animals. 5 stars
February 23, 2019
Snakes being my favourite animals, this is the sort of book I've always wanted. Mark O'Shea provides informative profiles of 600 species of snake (almost one in six of all currently known species), each with high-quality photographs, and spanning the breadth of the snake family tree. Most of the really familiar and important species are covered, and if a particular well-known species doesn't get a profile to itself, it is usually mentioned in the 'Related Species' section for a snake of the same genus. There are also plenty of snakes for whom little is known, providing more diversity for the book and emphasising how much we still have to learn about these fascinating reptiles.
January 2, 2021
I enjoyed this book very much and It had many different kinds of snakes I did not know excited. Also now I can tell my friends all about the toxin in a snake's fang! The only problem was I was referring to it for the other book I was reading, World Wild Vet, for the snakes in the book but could not find them. I think it might have been easier for people if they had a few more common snakes like the fer-de-lance, or olive python both two more commonly known snakes.
May 21, 2023
Wonderful and Informative Book about Snakes
Fascinating Book about the more than six hundred species of snakes. I have always been a true animal lover, and that means all animals, not just the fluffy and/or cuddly ones like kittens and puppies. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in snakes, reptiles or animals in general. This book has wonderful and informative text and beautiful photos of hundreds of different snakes. Anyone interested will really enjoy it.
Fascinating Book about the more than six hundred species of snakes. I have always been a true animal lover, and that means all animals, not just the fluffy and/or cuddly ones like kittens and puppies. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in snakes, reptiles or animals in general. This book has wonderful and informative text and beautiful photos of hundreds of different snakes. Anyone interested will really enjoy it.
November 12, 2022
It's a pretty neat and brief overview of a lot of snakes. Quite nice.
March 10, 2024
The introductory sections about snakes are well done and give one a great understanding of these wonderful animals. The one-page details of individual species with photos are great fun to skim through, really impressing upon the reader the diversity of these animals. Nice presentation of the details for a quick understanding of each species, including diet and reproduction.
For an amateur or expert, this is a great reference for snakes around the world. For the amateur, the index of common names is lacking, as it uses only one way to get at an individual species, not the several ways common names may be used. For example, "rubber boa" or "boa, rubber" or "northern rubber boa", only one is indexed. For those interested only in species in their area, a local guide should be used.
For an amateur or expert, this is a great reference for snakes around the world. For the amateur, the index of common names is lacking, as it uses only one way to get at an individual species, not the several ways common names may be used. For example, "rubber boa" or "boa, rubber" or "northern rubber boa", only one is indexed. For those interested only in species in their area, a local guide should be used.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews