Word: snaked
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Snake Man, by Alan Wykes. An engrossing portrait of a legendary eccentric of British East Africa, C.J.P. Ionides, whose passion is the care and capture of snakes...
...warden, and a devout herpetologist. Piecing all these lives of a non-pukka sahib together, Biographer Alan Wykes, a London magazine editor, has drawn a fascinating profile of a man with all the imperious instincts of an aristocrat and not an inhibiting trace of the code of a gentleman. Snake Man neatly blends action and memory, talk and adventure, snake lore and Ionides lore...
...lived for ten days on the partial contents of two ostrich eggs, been trampled by a charging elephant resulting in total deafness of one ear, climbed a 100-ft. tree, despite acrophobia, and with only one arm free, brought down a writhing mamba. He has been bitten by snakes half a dozen times, recorded his numbed sensations and degrees of pain with cool scientific exactitude, and never used antivenin. He has had an entire native village flogged for disobedience and has no qualms about flogging ("It is simple and effective and very widely understood"). He has also spent an entire...
Behind the slightly raffish, egocentric cast of Ionides' character lies solid achievement as a naturalist. No less than four separate species of snake bear his Latinized name as their discoverer, and 22 species of rare mammals have been hunted down by Ionides for zoos and museums, including the Addra gazelle, the sassaby, the Nubian ibex and the scimitar-horned white oryx...
Living Book. Naturally, Ionides is a living book of knowledge on the ways of the snake. A spitting cobra spits in one's eye. Ionides was temporarily blinded and in pain for two days. Love among the serpents is pretty snaky. Rival males get all intertwined in a knot. "Nobody knows how the winner wins, or why," but the suitors are good sports-they never bite each other. The snake with the deadliest bite is the Gaboon viper, a hideous flat-headed creature whose two-inch fangs can bring agonizing death in three seconds...