New York Times’ Rave: THE LIZARD KING is “a wild, wooly, finny, feathery, and scaly account of animal smuggling on a grand scale…”!!
“THE LIZARD KING is a wild, woolly, finny, feathery and scaly account of animal smuggling on a grand scale, in a weird world so expansive that a few hundred stray snakes and turtles amount to peanuts. Mr. Christy is after much bigger game . . . Mr. Christy’s entertaining book is about the crooks, swashbucklers and drug kingpins who constitute the underbelly of the reptile-dealing world . . . To capture this kind of stunt as effervescently as he does, Mr. Christy must share some of his subjects’ fetishism. (He himself was a snake-fancying kid. He also worked for Ray Van Nostrand cleaning snake cages while doing research for the THE LIZARD KING) So he understands the basic principle that governs reptile trafficking: collectors’ tastes evolve on a ‘bigger, meaner, rarer, hot’ trajectory . . . The chase eventually becomes international. So Mr. Christy has the makings of cat-and-mouse suspense. He also has a tangle of smugglers, agents, breeders and highly colorful minor players (like the tiger-purchasing Miami gangster who sounds like the prototype for “Scarface”) with stories to tell . . . .” READ THE FULL REVIEW…
—Janet Maslin, New York Times, 8/7/08
“…[I]t seemed to me to be a reminder that there was magic to be found, if I didn’t try so hard.” –Author’s Note, THE LIZARD KING. Ms. Maslin’s review is certainly a testament to magic’s existence. It scares me how close I came to missing today, this review, the New York Times. I would have missed it simply by putting my wingtips on as I had the day before, and knotting my necktie.
Tags: Coldblooded, Janet Maslin, New York Times
August 7th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
[...] Original post by Bryan Christy [...]