Snakes of the world A guide to every family

O'Shea (Univ. of Wolverhampton), a well-known TV communicator on "Herps," has organized this volume taxonomically, emphasizing the higher categories of infraorders and then clades, a method that will probably be unfamiliar to most readers. The well-illustrated introduction covers snake biology and snakes in human culture (e.g., fear, worship), taxonomy, evolution, anatomy, fangs and venoms, skin, scales and locomotion, sense organs, ecology and adaptation to extreme environments, courtship and reproduction, feeding and diets, defense and threats, extinctions and conservation--all in the first 60 pages. Then O'Shea presents clear and copiously illustrated family-by-family coverage of the five blind snake families, while the remaining 90 percent of the four thousand known snake species are assigned to the infraorder Alethinophidia, divided into two clades: the neotropical Amerophidia (2 families) and global Afrophidia (about 35 families). Each family merits at least two pages of textual description, including distributions and physical attributes, accompanied by large and lovely photographs. The organization by clades will give the reader some idea of the higher-order taxonomy of snakes, which is well illustrated by the phenograms. A reader who loses track of the infraorder organization may focus instead on the beautiful illustrations and the clear distribution maps for each family. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. --Joanna Burger, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick