Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery - Couverture rigide

Smith, Jennie Erin

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0307381471 ISBN 13 : 9780307381477

Editeur : Crown Pub, 2011

Synopsis

Book by Smith Jennie Erin

A propos du livre

Revue de presse

“I'm trying to think of the best way to say how absolutely marvelous Stolen World is and wondering if the answer can't be found in the subtitle: ‘A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery.’ Yes, it's got all that, along with screwball comedy and a subtle, understated sermon on ecological values. But wait! - as they say in those zany TV commercials – there’s more! At some point in her creative process, journalist Jennie Erin Smith has added, in semi-invisible ink, ‘And That Crazy Brother of Yours, Who Hides in the Basement and Plays With Mamba Snakes, Even Though He’s 53 Years Old’...this book is a treat.”
—Washington Post
 
“Any work of nonfiction that contains the sentence ‘He boarded a plane to Stuttgart with a Tasmanian devil in his hand luggage’ is a title worth attending to, but when the man with the carnivorous marsupial in his carry-on is merely a supporting character — and not the most interesting one at that — it's time to cancel your dinner date and take the phone off the hook. Jennie Erin Smith's Stolen World is a book that fully justifies such measures, a flabbergasting chronicle of atrocious behavior, foolhardy schemes and dangerous animals that reads like a real-life Elmore Leonard novel.”
—Salon.com

“Science reporter Smith debuts with an exciting tale of reptile smuggling . . . A richly detailed narrative of global malfeasance.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Very disturbing and very entertaining chronicle of reptile smugglers... Science reporter Smith's affection for these unsavory people gives the book an intriguing moral ambiguity (which might make some environmentalists cringe), but the subculture's brazen shenanigans make for a convoluted, fascinating tale.”  —Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review

“IF DARWIN, DOSTOYEVSKY, AND GEORGE LUCAS had collaborated on a novel, it might have resembled Stolen World. But it’s all true. The characters of Henry Molt and Tommy Crutchfield are Indiana Jones wannabes rewritten by Monty Python, as bizarre, dark, funny, and irresistible as any of the nobler yet loonier protagonists of fiction. Jennie Erin Smith has unearthed a riveting tale of the collision of the old world of zoological adventuring and the new world of Greenpeace and political correctness. And her writing serves it up superbly, the equal to every fantastic element of this wondrous, strange, endearing story of human folly.”
—Peter Nichols, author of A Voyage for Madmen
 
“The snakes in the grass are not necessarily reptiles in Jennie Erin Smith’s marvelous book. They’re smugglers in love with wild life in all of its manifestations, and you’ll find yourself
rooting for them against the zooreaucrats who lust after the same beautiful and often deadly beasts. Smith conveys this stolen world with—dare I say it?—a viperish wit.”
—Will Blythe, author of To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever

Présentation de l'éditeur

Tortoises disappear from a Madagascar reserve and reappear in the Bronx Zoo. A dead iguana floats in a jar, awaiting its unveiling in a Florida court. A viper causes mayhem from Ethiopia to Virginia. In Stolen World, Jennie Erin Smith takes the reader on an unforgettable journey, a dark adventure over five decades and six continents. 
 
In 1965, Hank Molt, a young cheese salesman from Philadelphia, reinvented himself as a “specialist dealer in rare fauna,” traveling the world to collect exquisite reptiles for zoos and museums. By the end of the decade that followed, new endangered species laws had turned Molt into a convicted smuggler, and an unrepentant one, who went on to provide many of the same rare reptiles to many of the same institutions, covertly. 

But Molt soon found a rival in Tommy Crutchfield, a Florida carpet salesman with every intention of usurping Molt as the most accomplished reptile smuggler in the country. Like Molt, Crutchfield had modeled himself after an earlier generation of natural-history collectors celebrated for their service to science, an ideal that, for Molt and Crutchfield, eclipsed the realities of the new wildlife-protection laws. Zoo curators, caught between a desire for rare animals and the conservation-minded focus of their institutions, became the smugglers’ antagonists in court but also their best customers, sometimes simultaneously. 

Crutchfield forged ties with a criminally inclined Malaysian wildlife trader and emerged a millionaire, beloved by some of the finest zoos in the world. Molt, following a string of inventive but disastrous smuggling schemes in New Guinea, was reduced to hanging around Crutchfield’s Florida compound, plotting Crutchfield’s demise. The fallout from their feud would result in a major federal investigation with tentacles in Germany, Madagascar, Holland, and Malaysia. And yet even after prison, personal ruin, and the depredations of age, Molt and Crutchfield never stopped scheming, never stopped longing for the snake or lizard that would earn each his rightful place in a world that had forgotten them—or rather, had never recognized them to begin with.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Crown Pub
• Date d'édition: 2011
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0307381471
• ISBN 13: 9780307381477
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 322
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: MUSIC STORE professional GmbH; 022188841282; Lars.Mueller@musicstore.de; ; Istanbulstr. 22-26; Köln; 51103; Allemagne