The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators

By Gordon Grice

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385318901
• ISBN13: 9780385318907
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: Bantam Dell
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Non-fiction work that reads like a monster story

Gordon Grice has a disturbing fascination with bugs, spiders in particular. But his fascination is our entertainment, as he writes in flowing prose his observations of these nasty little crawlers. The Red Hourglass is an extremely well-written account of the habits and habitats of things that creep in the night. The book is divided into seven different studies, Black Widow, Mantid, Rattlesnake, Tarantula, Pig, Canid, and Recluse. Though Grice gives fascinating accounts of the darker aspects of pigs and dogs, it is painfully clear in his writings that his love is truly for the spider. The Red Hourglass is a non-fiction book that is written with such interesting and personal observations that it feels somewhat like a monster story at times. If you want to find out more about these creepy, crawly, nasty little arachnids, Grice is an excellent way to learn. This would be a great book to get kids started on taking interest with biology or even anthropology studies, it's that well written And I hate spiders. Go ahead and grab up a copy of The Red Hourglass, I doubt you will ever find non-fiction reading as fun as Grice, having the same flair with his biology studies as Kurt Eicheneald does with his political studies. Enjoy!

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.

great prose, sophisticated biology

Do yourself a favor and buy this book. If you like to read about the lives of strange critters, and appreciate fine prose and precise natural historical observation,you will enjoy this book immensely. The author also betrays a sophisticated understanding of both the science, and mystery, of life, which he nevertheless wears lightly. The down-to-earth spirit of Nebraska and Oklaholma also shines through the deceptively simple prose style. Finally, the book is devoid of any of the man and nature, circle of life, save the whale posing that mars so many nature books. This is true, backyard natural history, not politics. If you think you might like this book, you will.

entertaining yet very enlightening

although mr. gordon grice avoides the jargon of the entomologist, his observations and writings are precise and quite informative.