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Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels Audiobook
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What is it about eels? Depending on who you ask, they are a pest, a fascination, a threat, a pot of gold. 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 fascination with this mysterious creature. Despite centuries of study by thinkers from Aristotle to Leeuwenhoek to Sigmund Freud, much about eels remains unknown. Eels cannot be bred reliably in captivity and infant eels are unbelievably valuable. A pound of the tiny, translucent, bug-eyed "elvers" caught in the 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.
Ruppel Shell follows the elusive eel from Maine to the Sargasso Sea, stalking riversides, fishing holes, laboratories, restaurants, courtrooms, and America's first commercial eel "family farm." 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.
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“This natural history of the eel gets a jovial performance from narrator Coleen Marlo…[and] she gets most of the tricky Maine place names right.”
— AudioFile
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“It’s part natural history, part true crime, and buckets of slippery, slimy fun. You won’t be able to put it down.”
— The Nature Conservancy
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About Ellen Ruppel Shell
Ellen Ruppel Shell, the author of five books, is also a prize–winning journalist who has contributed to scores of publications, including Smithsonian, Scientific American, Science, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She was a longtime contributing editor and correspondent for The Atlantic. She is professor emeritus of science journalism at Boston University.
About Coleen Marlo
Coleen Marlo is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator who has been nominated for an Audie Award twice, winning in 2011. She has been awarded three Listen-Up Awards from Publishers Weekly, an AudioFile Audiobook of the Year Award in 2011, and was named Audiobook Narrator of the Year for 2010 by Publishers Weekly. She is a member of the prestigious Actors Studio and taught acting for ten years at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. Marlo is a proud founding member of Deyan Institute of Voice Artistry and Technology.