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Synopses & Reviews
Ellen Ruppel Shell's Slippery Beast is a fascinating account of a deeply mysterious creature--the eel--a thrilling saga of true crime, natural history, travel, and big business.
What is it about eels? Depending on who you ask, they are a pest, a fascination, a threat, a pot of gold. What they are not is predictable. Eels emerged some 200 million years ago, weathered mass extinctions and continental shifts, and were once among the world's most abundant freshwater fish. But since the 1970s, their numbers have plummeted. Because eels--as unagi--are another thing: delicious.
In Slippery Beast, journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell travels in the world of "eel people," pursuing a burgeoning fascination with this mysterious and highly coveted creature. Despite centuries of study by celebrated thinkers from Aristotle to Leeuwenhoek to a young Sigmund Freud, much about eels remains unknown, including exactly how eels beget other eels. Eels cannot be bred reliably in captivity, and as a result, infant eels are unbelievably valuable. A pound of the tiny, translucent, bug-eyed "elvers" caught in the cold fresh waters of Maine can command $3,000 or more on the black market. Illegal trade in eels is an international scandal measured in billions of dollars every year. In Maine, federal investigators have risked their lives to bust poaching rings, including the notorious half-decade-long "Operation Broken Glass."
Ruppel Shell follows the elusive eel from Maine to the Sargasso Sea and back, stalking riversides, fishing holes, laboratories, restaurants, courtrooms, and America's first commercial eel "family farm," which just might upend the international market and save a state. This is an enthralling, globe-spanning look at an animal that you may never come to love, but which will never fail to astonish you, a miraculous creature that tells more about us than we can ever know about it.
Review
“Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Slippery Beast is witty, smart, extremely well reported, and full of good storytelling. The writing manages to be both elegant and colloquial at the same time. This book masquerades as a study of eels, and, for sure, there is plenty to learn about the lifestyles of eels, but, in fact, Slippery Beast touches on many topics of human concern, from commerce to government to living communities, from Aristotle to Darwin to Freud.” -Alan Lightman, MIT professor, bestselling author of Einstein’s Dreams, and host of Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science
Review
“If you are not already enchanted by eels, this anomalous situation will be resolved after a few pages of this spellbinding book. Ellen Ruppel Shell will astound you, delight you, distress you, and make you fall in love with these mysterious, shape-shifting creatures, and with the many ways eel and human lives intertwine.” -Sy Montgomery, New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of An Octopus
About the Author
Prize winning journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell has contributed to scores of publications including The Smithsonian, Scientific American, Science, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Professor Emeritus of science journalism at Boston University, she was a longtime contributing editor and correspondent to the Atlantic, and the author of four previous books, including Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.