Pat Spain is used to doing things that he acknowledges are not normal — such as lying in a pit of 200,000 snakes or having a pygmy village take excessive interest in his bathroom habits. /Sea Serpents: On the Hunt in British Columbia/ chronicles the coolest thing this host of ... more >
A wry and thought-provoking tale about the defiant, eccentric figures obsessed with Australia’s deadliest reptiles. Raymond Hoser is known as the “Snakeman,” a moniker that he has zealously defended. As a day job, Hoser runs a Melbourne business that offers services such as snake removal and snake shows. But by ... more >
Pat Spain is not a very good dancer. Nor is he a person used to wearing bikini briefs, or wrestling in front of hundreds of nomads and an international TV audience. He is certainly not a person you would expect to find wearing said bikini briefs while dancing in front ... more >
“This is the scene everyone will remember,” is how the director described the bullet-ant ceremony moments before Pat Spain took his place in the line of initiates. If online views, memes, family parties, and talk-show mentions are the measure, he wasn’t wrong. The Tucandeira ceremony of the Sateré-Mawé is known ... more >
Pat Spain was nearly thrown in a Cameroonian prison, learned to use a long-drop toilet while a village of pygmy children watched, and was deemed “too dirty to fly” for this book. On the Hunt in West Africa finds Bostonian Pat Spain, an inexperienced but enthusiastic traveler and wildlife biologist, ... more >