VENOMOUS snakes, outlaws and 5-metre alligators are the meat of Laura Ogden’s account of life in the Florida Everglades.
Ogden, associate professor of anthropology at Florida International University, has spent the last 10 years interviewing the “gladesmen” who lived and hunted in this vast swamp in decades gone by. In Swamplife, she recounts their close association with a landscape in constant flux – in which hunters become poachers, swamps become shopping malls, and alligators become handbags.
For decades, gladesmen supplemented their income by hunting alligators for their hides. Ogden gives a fascinating account of the tricks they used to capture and…
