Landscape with Reptile

"An intriguing examination of a human wildlife relationship that will probably become increasingly common as the apparently inexorable pressures of human populations and demands overwhelm the natural world.-- ""Natural History"" Prime nature writing, capably focused through multiple views of natural history, ecology, medicine, history, evolution, and anthropology.-- ""Kirkus Reviews"" Rattlesnakes are just a focal point for Palmer. He allows them to lead him into bracing and often witty reconsiderations of other topics: biodiversity, environmentalism, modern medicine, the Puritan legacy, New England history, and the work of such naturalists as Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz. . . . It's hard to imagine an amateur naturalist who wouldn't enjoy it.-- ""Cleveland Plain Dealer"" Landscape with Reptile, like so many great works of nature writing, binds itself strictly in one dimension and in doing so opens a wide vista in all other dimensions. . . . The book combines a series of lively and fascinating vignettes on matters like Ice Ages, colonial renegades, killer quarries, and medical quackery, with an overarching meditation on how human beings turn the living world--snakes, landscapes, each other--into symbols with which to enact morality plays of highly questionable sophistication and relevance.-- ""Brain in a Girl-shaped Jar blog"" Palmer tells us everything we didn't think we wanted to know about rattlesnakes, but Landscape with Reptile delivers much more than that. In fact, it delivers what the title promises: a look at the very landscape we not only live in but have, in recent centuries, dominated.-- ""San Diego Tribune"" Palmer's book is a rarity--fascinating nature writing that includes human history and sociology along with ecology and evolution. Palmer takes that unlovable creature, the timber rattlesnake, and uses it to discuss an incredible variety of topics related to our relationships with the natural world. . . . He shows us the world and its history from a perspective we seldom even imagine. Landscape with Reptile is essential for herpetological and regional New England collections and is an excellent selection for general natural history collections.-- ""Library Journal"" Palmer's loose-limbed and likable study of natural history coils in and out of many other areas, too. . . . Landscape with Reptile is deliberately digressive; Palmer's method in this quirky yet appealing book follows an undulating pattern that shows we have merely used Crotalus, 'it seemed, to define ourselves.'-- ""Boston Globe"""