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The Red Hourglass: Lives Of the Predators
[Paperback - 1999]
gordon grice
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Availability in 4-6 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: $20
Our Price: Rs.3695
Category: Nature
Sub-category: Nature
Publisher: Delta | ISBN: 9780385318907 | Pages: 276
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Description

Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in The Red Hourglass, prize-winning author Gordon Grice's masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators he has encountered around his rural Oklahoma home. Grice is a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains, scattered like "the cast-off coats of untidy children," tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness--the world in which we live. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, Grice abandons his role as objective observer with beguiling dark humor--collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture, or forcing a battle between captive insects because he deems one "too stupid to live." Kill. Eat. Mate. Die. Charting the simple brutality of the lives of these predators, Grice's starkly graceful essays guide us toward startling truths about our own predatory nature. The Red Hourglass brings us face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil.

About the Author

Gordon Grice has written about the dark corners of biology for The New Yorker (where he tackled the history of post-mortem dissections), Harper’s (black widow spiders), and Discover (leprosy). His books include The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators and Deadly Kingdom (paperback: The Book of Deadly Animals). His other projects include National Geographic’s eBook short Shark Attacks: Inside the Mind of the Ocean’s Most Terrifying Predator and more than a dozen horror stories in magazines, including the Best of the ‘Net winner “The White Cat” and the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror runner-up “Hide.”

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