Product 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.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1099162 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-09
• Released on: 1999-03-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Amazon.com
Gordon Grice, a young essayist from rural western Oklahoma, writes winningly of insects in all their glory, basing his narrative on lifelong observations of creatures such as the black widow, praying mantis, brown recluse--and the occasional human being. For the black widow spider he professes an affectionate fascination, dangerous though the spider may be; for the brown recluse, a more dangerous creature still, he exhibits a healthy respect; for all the creatures who fall under his survey, he has many sympathies. Grice writes with good humor, even when he's writing of matters that are not for the squeamish, as when he describes the rather gruesome ways in which female mantises dispose of inconvenient mates or humans dispose of each other.

From Publishers Weekly
Readers seeking evidence of "Nature red in tooth and claw" will find it in this first-rate popular science book. Grice, who teaches humanities and English at Seward County Community College, examines in feisty, felicitous prose the life and lore of some lesser predators?spiders, mantids, tarantulas, rattlesnakes, pigs and canids. He notes that the praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head?the better for the female to decapitate her mate as they copulate. Grice attends a rattlesnake roundup, visits a pig factory and talks with wolf-dog breeders. He discusses similarities between pigs and humans, wolves and humans. He describes, in gruesome detail, the effects of spider and snake toxins on the human body. While not for the queasy, the book captures attention, and not least in its philosophic leaps. The bite of the black widow (red hourglass) spider, Grice explains, is lethal far beyond what is necessary to kill insects, its normal prey; it can slay mice, frogs, snakes, cats, dogs and humans. And so in that spider, Grice writes, "the analytical mind finds an irreducible mystery, a motiveless evil in nature."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Large predators inspire awe and respect; smaller predators, like spiders and snakes, inspire revulsion. This collection of seven essays examines several smaller predators, including black widows ("the red hourglass"), tarantulas, mantids, brown recluse spiders, and rattlesnakes. Grice is not overly sentimental; he raises black widows and is quite fond of them, but his rattlesnakes are personifications of pure evil. Two essays about larger predators, the pig and the "canid," are as much about humans as about the predators of the title. Grice's essays are personal and graphic, with all of the morbid fascination of a train wreck, and although the natural history is good, this collection is more valuable for its literary than its scientific merit. (Grice teaches English at Seward Community College in Kansas.) Recommended for both academic and public libraries.?Bruce D. Neville, Univ. of New Mexico Lib., Albuquerque
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Grice takes on arthropods with Poe-like sensitivity
What the reader gets with this book are seven essays written by a literary/humanities based college professor on seven particular predators: the black widow, the praying mantis, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, pigs, dogs, and the brown recluse spider. The writing is surpisingly good and the subject matter, while somewhat dark and gory, is fascinating.

The reader from Michigan calls this book 'backyard naturalism' in a derogatory manner. I am a biology major and, although the majority of Grice's claims appear consistent with similar data I have seen, this is not a hard science book; criticizing it in that context is an apples verses oranges category mistake. Conversely, I praise this work as 'backyard naturalism' at its best. I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Red Hourglass from front to back. Take a bit of Peter Matthiessen's literary organicism, a pinch of Steven King's macabre involvment, E. O. Wilson's entomology, a dash of Desiderius Erasmus' sad, pragmatic humor, and some of Montaigne's candor, and you can wile away sumptuous moments zoosynthesizing the adventure of the 'The Incredible Shrinking Man' crossed with a bored boy's deific experimentation with arthropods, among other animals; all written with starkness and skill. What's a long pig? one may ask. The very sight of egregious brown recluse bites makes me kiss the soil of northern California.

This book is a good mix of the literary and scientific milieus. It draws one in by the curiousity and repulsion of the subject matter as ruse for the author's peculiar expository skill.

Riveting
Who knew just how deadly the world around us was? Grice covers a wide range of beasts: Spiders (Black Widow, Tarantula, Recluse a.k.a. Violin Spider), rattlesnake, pig, dogs (wolves, coyotes, jackals) and the praying mantis. He has a lyrical eloquence and interstices natural philosophy into the essays, making the book far more than a recitation or list of aspects of bestial killers.
One slightly disturbing feature is Grice's juvenile behavoir in collecting insects and tossing them together in tanks to see who lives. I began to feel that I was reading the Diary of a Madman, and hurried through these anecdotes.
The abilities of these various animals to kill and their instincts to murder--for food or fun--were fascinating, as were Grice's parallels to us as human predators.

Erroneous Essays
A lazyman's nature book, "The Red Hourglass" is pure anthropomorphism--the author, who gives entirely ancecdodal evidence about nature's various predators, devoid of a single footnote (his sources for the anecdotes are rarely named; they are simply called "a scientist," or "a doctor"), doesn't seem to have wanted to concern himself with empirical, noted evidence. In other words, the reader has to take Grice's word about the accuracy of his "scientific" and historical comments, since he doesn't want to be weighted down by bibliographic sources or even noting his own sources. Even the National Enquirer or other cheesy newspaper tabloid occasionally mentions its sources. To be sure, this book makes for chilly reading, despite a less-than-sophisticated prose style, but don't rely on it as a nature guide. Rather, if you must read it, do so as a single person's view of the world of predators. Without scientific background or foundations, his voice is no more authoritative than yours or mine.