Across the cover of The Snake Charmer: A Life And Death In Pursuit Of Knowledge winds a many-banded
krait, a snake so venomous that American military personnel in Vietnam
nicknamed it the two-step snake—as in, get bit, take two steps, fall over
dead. While that's a slight exaggeration, the neurotoxin in the krait's saliva
works over a matter of hours to shut down the human nervous system, leading to
asphyxiation when the diaphragm stops responding. In the book's opening
chapter, California Academy Of Science daredevil herpetologist Joe Slowinski
leads a team through largely unexplored upper Burma, collecting specimens and
trying to keep on the right side of the country's capricious military junta.
When Slowinski reaches into a bag to examine a snake caught by one of his
colleagues, and gets bitten on the finger, there's a moment of hope that the
snake is a Dinodon, a non-venomous variety whose coloration almost perfectly
mimics the krait's. But Slowinski knows better.
Jamie James uses
Slowinski's 2001 mishap—surprisingly rare in herpetological
fieldwork—as an entry point into his troubled career. Slowinski hunted
for mastodon fossils in the Kaw riverbanks growing up, and thought he might
study paleontology. At the University of Kansas, he developed a passion for
snakes, especially the dangerous ones. "Herpers," James explains, are a weird
breed: undisciplined, macho, uninterested in normal relationships. Other
scientists view the ones who hunt poisonous reptiles with suspicion; they're
less meticulous chroniclers of the natural world than cowboys spoiling for a
fight. Slowinski looked like a washout, in spite of his brilliance, until he
lucked into the CAS job. But his bad habits (or are they emotional defects?)
follow him on his quest for fame and fortune, all the way to an isolated
Burmese village named Rat Baw.
While James has his
limitations as a chronicler of Slowinski's story (oh, what a Jon Krakauer or
Bill Bryson could have done with the material), he makes a brilliant decision
to frame the narrative with the krait bite. All the successes, disappointments,
and unfulfilled promise of a career boil down to a man getting mouth-to-mouth
respiration in a remote schoolhouse and hoping that the paralyzed world of
September 11, 2001, can get a helicopter to him. It's a fascinating, bitter
elegy for a man incapable of living within civilized precautions.