Wednesday, April 15, 2009

What I have been reading lately #23

I just finished reading The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers by Bryan Christy.  It is about international reptile smugglers and the overworked, underfunded U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agents who try to stop them from smuggling reptiles.  While the subject was interesting, the book was not very well written.  The author took a lot of time to set up the main villain (Michael Van Nostrand who operates a Florida-based reptile business called Strictly Reptiles) but then failed to really explain how the federal government finally brought him down.
Below: Michael Van Nostrand with a turtle, or is it a tortoise?



1 comment:

Gray said...

I believe it is a tortoise.

"Hockey ought to be sternly forbidden, as it is not only annoying but dangerous." Halifax Morning Sun, quoted in Michael McKinley's Hockey - A People's History