“Why does a snake cross the road?” In Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World, that’s not just a twist on the age-old riddle—it’s the impetus for an experiment conducted by scientists curious about snake behavior upon encountering a road and how they might react if a pickup truck sped by.
As science journalist and author Stephen S. Hall explains, that experiment revealed differences in various snake species’ willingness to cross the road and their surprising unanimity upon traversing it: “every snake that crossed the road did so at a 90-degree angle . . . they somehow perceived (or intuited) the shortest distance to the other side and made a perpendicular beeline to safety.”
That’s just one of myriad revelations in Hall’s impressively wide-ranging survey of and tribute to the sinuous creatures. As a child, he experienced “a relationship built of equal parts fascination, fear, admiration, and perhaps a secret sentimental affinity for a particularly wild and despised form of Otherness” after holding a snake for the first time. Now, he informs and inspires as he explores how snakes have been depicted in art, culture, mythology, religion and history. After all, “they’ve been around for some 130 to 150 million years,” during which they’ve been centered in religious texts a la the Garden of Eden, coiled their way around art both ancient and modern, famously terrified filmdom’s Indiana Jones and more.
If a study of snakes sounds like a niche topic, consider that Hall has authored books about topics diverse as height, wisdom, cartography and genetic engineering. His plunge into snake-centric science blends detailed data and engaging anecdotes with writerly aplomb. At the Bronx Zoo, he ponders the evolution of herpetology, and at Mount Holyoke College, he learns about snake courtship and sex. When he joins a Burmese python hunt in the Florida Everglades, the effects of invasive species are top of mind, as is the evolution of the creatures, who withstood a historic deep freeze there in 2010. Snakes “grace us with . . . the unearthly, eternal beauty of survival,” the author marvels, and we have much to learn from them, if only we can swap fear for curiosity and disgust for appreciation.