The Lizard King: A Hatchling Tale

Earlier this month, TWELVE author Bryan Christy toured Southeast Asia-- promoting The Lizard King, and learning of the book's positive impact on the wildlife laws of the region. In this blog post, he shares some of the highpoints of the trip, and reveals just what it feels like to be treated like a "minor rock star" in Thailand and Malaysia.

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I've returned from three weeks in Southeast Asia, ground zero for international wildlife trafficking. I was invited there by a number of organizations, including the Academy of Sciences Malaysia, Singapore Law School, the Siam Society of Bangkok, and MPH Bookstore.

In Malaysia, where I spent the most of the trip, I felt like a minor rock star. I appeared on a Regis and Kelly-type morning television show and the Charlie Rose-style, "Point of View." I did FM radio from LiteFM to TraXX (this is not the range it might appear to be). I spent afternoons at a Starbucks while every 90 minutes another reporter showed up for his or her appointment. Every major newspaper, from the free daily to Malaysia's top three papers, has covered The Lizard King, most with a full page or more. I am told that more stories have appeared on wildlife trade in Malaysia in the five months since The Lizard King appeared than during the past three years.

The main interest in Asia is the chapter entitled, Fortress Malaysia, which chronicles the undercover operation against Malaysian Anson Wong, "Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking," and his role in the syndicate run by The Lizard King, Mike Van Nostrand. Anson confirms what many in Malaysia have long believed: government corruption is what makes their country wildlife trafficking's top hub.

Predictably, the Malaysian Wildlife Department has criticized the book, calling it "a fiction" to one newspaper. I obtained a copy of the Department's official statement, which describes The Lizard King as "... merely a fiction. An imaginative literary work and it involved [sic] imagination, fantasy, invention, fabrication and made-up story." The statement goes on to praise Anson Wong for carrying out his business legally.

Central casting could not have provided a better governmental thug.

That's not me talking, it's the Malaysian people. Letters poured into the media decrying the Wildlife Department's defensive response. The Regional Director of TRAFFIC Southeast Asia, the trade-monitoring arm of the World Wildlife Fund, called on the Wildlife Department to investigate corruption presented in The Lizard King, as the Royal Malaysian Customs Department promised it would do. In coming weeks the Ministry of Environment overseeing the Wildlife Department changed its tone. It issued statements acknowledging that Malaysian law was inadequate to deal with criminal syndicates and promising to amend the law to address such crimes. The government also promised to increase enforcement at the country's borders. Those familiar with PR efforts await the pudding, but it is a start, and I'm proud of it.

The book has had other impact. TRAFFIC Southeast Asia has begun distributing it during its law enforcement trainings throughout the region. A new judiciary workshop has designed a case study around it. Universities are asking how to include the book in their environmental programs. I have received thanks from law enforcement officers from the U.S., Canada, Australia, Thailand, Japan--and, most rewarding, from Malaysia.

Given the Malaysian Wildlife Department's official response I had no idea what to expect when I arrived at the Academy of Sciences in Kuala Lumpur. To my great and humbling surprise, wildlife officers from around the country drove hours in some cases to hear me speak. Their courageous, career-risking acts broke my heart. Veterinary programs in the U.S. have asked me to come and speak on the world of exotic animal trade. The reptile world, too, has embraced the book. For three days I autographed books at a Border's booth at the world's largest reptile trade show.

The Lizard King is less than six months old. It has fused my childhood passion for reptiles with my adult interests in law and culture. I'm pleased it's made it from the egg to the ocean.

--Bryan Christy

Recommended Reading

In "Recommended Reading," we'll take turns writing about books from other publishers. In this installment Jon Karp discusses the oeuvre of Bob Woodward, whose book The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008 came out from Simon & Schuster in September.



In Praise of Bob Woodward
By Jonathan Karp

George W. Bush sent me a letter once. I keep it taped to my office door as a reminder of how quickly things can change.

I had commissioned Bill Minutaglio, then a reporter at the Dallas Morning News, to write a portrait of Bush. He had not yet decided to seek the presidency, and in his letter, dated May 22, 1998, he politely expressed his "misgivings" about the project: "I am amazed that anyone would want to do a biography about me. I have only lived 51 years. My life is far from complete. I am not even sure what the final chapters of a George W. biography will say, because I do not know what I will do."

Well, now we know.

It still seems remarkable to me that someone so ostensibly uncertain of his future could have ascended to the nation's highest office only a short time later. Minutaglio's book, First Son, offered a detailed first impression of Bush. Striving for a neutral tone, the author did his best to let Bush's personal history speak for itself. While I don't mean to suggest that the last eight years could have been avoided only if a few thousand Floridians had focused on Minutaglio's book, I do believe that anyone who bothered to read about Bush should't have been surprised by the way he conducted his presidency.

The passages of First Son that have stayed with me most over the past ten years concern Bush's time at Yale. "He was not obsessed by anything, or a cause. He didn't have an agenda, a timetable, a program," according to his classmate, Muhammed Saleh. "We were in the Vietnam era, it was a big subject, and the big thing about George is that really he was not doctrinaire about anything. You would think, coming from a political family, that he would take strong views."

Minutaglio elaborates: "At Yale, he had aggressively avoided the weight, the intellectual gravity, the ambiguity unfolding before him -- “ all those questions being asked about hazing, about women being admitted, about fraternities, secret societies, jocks, Vietnam, the government, big business. Years later, he was certain about his aversion to all of it." Bush himself agreed with this characterization. "I don't remember any kind of heaviness ruining my time at Yale."
As I've watched the Bush presidency unfold, I've often wondered whether the lasting lesson of Minutaglio's account is that people really don't really change all that much; that the person Bush was at Yale is basically the same guy who occupied the White House. A few years later, I edited a book by Bush speechwriter David Frum, who, though largely admiring of the president, described his former boss as: "impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill-informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be."

Of all the Bush books I've read, Bob Woodward's have been the most illuminating. I concur with Jill Abramson's New York Times Book Review assessment: "These books may be the best record we will ever get of the events they cover..." Simply by explaining what various administration officials said they were thinking at key moments during the past eight years, Woodward has provided a valuable template for historians. Two of my favorite scenes from Woodward's most recent book, The War Within, illustrate just how difficult it will be for historians to reach any firm conclusions about Iraq:

First, Woodward shows a side of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice we rarely see. On November 26, 2006, she challenged Bush: "You're not getting a clear picture of what's going on on the ground. The briefings from the military are a bunch of maps that nobody can read -- statistics that don't relate to anything....I don't know how anybody's going to tell you whether or not more troops are going to help when you don't know what's going on on the ground." What's so revealing about Rice's quote is what it acknowledges: the essential incomprehensibility of Iraq, even among the leaders who are supposed to be the most informed.

Then, there's a revealing exchange between President Bush and Woodward, one which underscores just how difficult it will be for historians to gauge President Bush's level of engagement with the facts. Woodward asks Bush to reconstruct what he said to General Casey, the commander in Iraq, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, when Bush realized the war strategy wasn't working. Bush's response: "I can't give you the interface [with] these men because I can't remember it." As Woodward puts it: "Iraq was the most important issue in Bush's presidency. He was commander in chief, and he knew the war was essentially failing. By his own account, he was thinking about it all the time. So I asked, 'Did you give them a deadline at this point?'

" 'I don't think I did,' the president said. 'This is nothing that you hurry.'" (Note that Bush isn't certain of what he said or did.) Woodward's rhetorical summation: "But how could there be no deadline, no hurry, three and a half years into a failing war?"

Bush's inability to remember such crucial details suggests just how disengaged he was from events. Or, perhaps Bush simply didn't want to talk, or his memory is capable of being refreshed once he has access to documents. Regardless, given how contemporaneous Woodward's reporting has been, the fog of war (and the memories of those who conducted it) will only grow thicker in the coming years. That's why Woodward's books will be an essential source.

One final unappreciated gem from The War Within: In one of their last conversations, Woodward asks the president if the United States is seeking "hegemony" in the Iraq region. Bush doesn't seem to understand the connotation of the word because National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley feels compelled to interrupt the president to note the word's imperial "implications." Bush chides Woodward for being "very tricky" and then goes the journalist one better by asking him whether the U.S. was "hegemonistic" in Japan, Germany, and Korea in the postwar years.

Woodward passes no judgment on Hadley's interruption or Bush's response, nor does the author point out that "hegemonistic" is barely a word; that "hegemonic" might be more apt. Woodward has long been criticized for not providing enough of an analytical frame to his reporting, but such criticism overlooks the lasting importance of Woodward's work. Facts and details tell the story, and in Woodward's world, we learn the story of official Washington's mindset. In the Bush years, no one has told it better.

Jonathan Karp is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of TWELVE.

The TwelveBooks podcast: Henry Alford on HOW TO LIVE

Prepare yourself for the son et lumiere (or really just the son) of Henry Alford, who inaugurates Twelve's podcast with a reading and discussion of HOW TO LIVE: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still On This Earth). You can tell that Alford is a radio pro. We're working on making it available through iTunes.

SOME LAST WORDS ON 2008

"Let's cut to the chase.
2008 was not a happy year."

It's not pretty, but Eric Weiner has a point:

"The U.S. economy sputtered, then went splat. The news from abroad wasn't much better. India suffered one if its worst ever terrorist attacks. China was hit by a devastating earthquake. Iceland, for years one of the world's happiest countries, experienced a financial meltdown. (More about that later.)"

Luckily, just before you embark on a three-day Xanax spiral, there's a reprieve:

So can we conclude that, given the grim headlines, we're all miserable now? Is the world really a less happy place? Not necessarily. Happiness bubbles are made of sterner stuff than real estate or stock bubbles. It takes a lot to shake a nation's happiness.

Phew! Click through to read the rest of Eric's full, frank appraisal of 2008. (You can also click here to read more about The Geography of Bliss, which is out in paperback this month).

BEHIND THE BOOK: Henry Alford dishes on "How To Live"

This month, Twelve is proud to publish How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still On This Earth). Publishers Weekly has called it one of the year's best books, and Vanity Fair has lauded the book for its "intellectual nimbleness," finding it "on par with Wilde and Benchley." Here, Henry answers questions posed by a mysterious stranger-- identified as Q-- summing up what it was like to write the book. You can visit Henry Alford's fabulous website here.

Q: So, what's the wisest thing in the book?
A: There's an Indonesian fisherman named Salama Kalathalay who saw portents of doom on the morning of the tsunami in 2003, and was able to save thousands of lives by telling his fellow tribe members to climb a local mountain.

Q: Nice...And didn't I read somewhere that your mother and stepfather's 23 year-long marriage erupted into flames as a result of this book?
A: Yes. They were NOT able to climb a local mountain.

Q: And, now that you've finished writing the book, what was your favorite part of working on it?
A: I will always cherish the time I spent with Sylvia Miles in her bathroom.

Q: Yes, that would be a high point for anyone...Well, I've heard a lot of buzz about "How to Live," so I'm predicting good things for you.
A: My only worry is that I'll run into the literary equivalent of the Bradley Effect--people who *SAY* they're interested in a book about old people but who, when they get in the store, buy a book about young people.

Q: I hate those people.
A: Thank you for your anger, Q.