Saturday, October 11th   The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers by Bryan Christy

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To Call These Guys Reptiles Is to Insult Reptiles A Review by Doug Brown In the herp world, there are two broad groups: academics (people who study crawlies at universities) and herpetoculturists (people who keep crawlies as pets). These groups are largely what Stephen Jay Gould called "Non-overlapping Magesteria," as many of the academics think the pet folks don't know much about herps, and many of the pet folks think the academics are a bunch of stuffy snobs. The major cause of friction between the two groups is over-collecting. Academics commonly don't reveal the exact location of their study sites to keep the pet-trade people from descending and taking all the animals. This happened when Carl Kauffeld made the Okeetee Hunt Club in South Carolina famous in his classic Snakes: The Keeper and the Kept. The world flooded in, and now corn snakes and scarlet kingsnakes are sparse on the ground in that patch of Jasper County. Even worse is when endangered animals are taken from the wild and smuggled across borders for trade. The Lizard King is a good...   Read the entire review More reviews from Powells.com

Between Here and April by Deborah Copaken Kogan Suffer the Little Children A Review by Ron Charles What could be better than working as a daredevil photojournalist, jetting around the world's hotspots and sleeping with alluring strangers? Motherhood, of course. Forget fame, danger and sex: Nothing compares with the thrill of tucking little ones into bed after supper. Or so Deborah Copaken Kogan told us in Shutterbabe, her wild 2001 memoir of capturing war photos and male booty. Fresh out of Harvard, this Potomac, Md., native ventured into Afghanistan, Bucharest and the Soviet Union during some of the most alarming crises of recent history. But then she found the man of her dreams ...   Read the entire review More reviews from Washington Post Book World				Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century by Marc Sageman Misery and Company A Review by Cass R. Sunstein A few years ago, Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade, and I were involved in several studies of punitive damage awards by juries. We began by asking one thousand or so demographically diverse people to register their judgments about misconduct by various wrongdoers. We asked them to rate their moral outrage on a scale of zero to six, where zero meant "not at all outrageous" and six meant "exceptionally outrageous." We also asked them to come up with an appropriate dollar award. To study their answers, we used a simple technique, in which individual responses are pooled to produce "statistical...   Read the entire review More reviews from The New Republic Online
When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson An Atkinson Mystery Is Always Good News A Review by Mary Ann Gwinn Here's a question a newspaper book editor fields at parties and PTA meetings: What's the best book you've read recently? Which is another way of saying: Who's an author who has knocked one out of the park? I think long and hard about the answer -- it needs to be a one-size-fits-all good read; not too long, not too arduous, but a showcase for a dazzling talent. For a couple of years, the answer was easy: Kate Atkinson's breakout mystery, 2004's Case Histories. Atkinson is an Edinburgh-based novelist who spent years composing brainy literary novels, one of which, Behind the Scenes at the...   Read the entire review More reviews from Seattle Times				Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne A Review by Paul Elmore More [Ed. note: This review, originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1901, covers eight books, Twice-Told Tales, The Scarlet Letter, Fanshawe, Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun.] In a notable passage, Hawthorne has said of his own Twice-Told Tales that "they have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade.... Instead of passion there is sentiment....Whether from lack of power or an unconquerable reserve, the author's touches have often an effect of tameness; the merriest man can...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Atlantic Monthly
Nothing to Be Frightened of by Julian Barnes You Can't Take It with You A Review by Frank Kermode E.M. Forster, who was sometimes criticized for scattering deaths too wantonly over his own plots, complained of "the studied ignorance of novelists" and advised them to "recapture their interest in death." He considered that interest to be a necessary element in true creativity. The novelist Julian Barnes easily eludes this criticism, being, as T.S. Eliot said of the dramatist John Webster, "much possessed by death." Dying and the mysterious state of being dead may be difficult and necessary subjects for novelists, but the question arises whether they are less urgent for the noncreative...   Read the entire review More reviews from New York Review of Books				Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard Attractions and Dangers of Nostalgia A Review by Hayden Carruth In many respects Annie Dillard's book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is so ingratiating that even readers who find themselves in fundamental disagreement with it may take pleasure from it, a good deal of pleasure. Of course confirmed city-dwellers, who want no more of nature than a Sunday stroll in the park, will find it a bore. But to armchair naturalists everywhere, and certainly to those who live in the country and seek a good part of their sense of reality in the natural world, her book offers much that is delightful, percipient, and informative. Where Tinker Creek is exactly, I don't know. ...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Virginia Quarterly Review