Another damn review: "the snake charmer" by Jamie James

I saw this book at the bookstore and bought it after reading the cover. I love snakes and this was part biography, part adventure/travelogue and part snake natural history. I enjoyed the entire book except that throughout the book, I knew the ending was tragic. The hero of our story, Joe Slowinski, is a herpetologist who was a born snake lover and an up and coming snake researcher who was at the zenith of his career. Everything in his life has come together. He's got a great job, a great girl, etc., and is leading an expedition to Burma to study snakes, which is one of his lifelong dreams. Unfortunately, during this expedition, he is accidentally bitten by a banded krait and dies. It's uncertain exactly why he got bitten; perhaps a snake was mislabeled, but at any rate, our hero put his hand into a bag with a krait and got bitten. In the middle of nowhere with no antivenom, to which he was allergic anyway, there was no real hope. So, if you love happy endings, don't read this, or any of the Lemony Snicket books either. But it was a fascinating read. I could not put this book down.