Snakemaster

May 26, 2014
TV personality and veteran herpetologist Stevens’s (The Last Snake Man) latest is a collection of career anecdotes that will likely send shivers up the spine of even the most snake-friendly reader. Opening with a harrowing tale of surviving a puff adder bite that almost cost him his finger, Stevens takes readers on an informative and adrenaline-charged look at a number of lethal snakes and other reptilian predators. Surprisingly, Stevens’s most exciting stories don’t come from deep within the wild but from his stints as a documentarian and a herpetological curator at an animal park where he often performed for the public, such as his near death run-in with a Gaboon viper and 107-day, glass-enclosed sit-in spent with 36 highly venomous snakes, including cobras and black mambas. These accounts, particularly a scene in which a clumsy cameraman almost brings the stunt to a deadly end (a recurring theme, as a cameraman makes a similar mistake in Germany, releasing four angry black mambas during filming), make for white-knuckle reading. Though he pauses for digressions on various snake venoms, snake bite remedies, and how he landed a show on the Discovery Channel, it’s those close encounters that’ll keep readers on the edge of their seat—and often looking under it. Photos.