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Marine Turtle Newsletter 13:17-18, © 1979

Book Review: Time of the Turtle

P.C.H. Pritchard
P.O. Drawer 7, Maitland, Florida, 32751, USA

(by Jack Rudloe. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1979. 273pp. $12.95 USA).

Jack Rudloe is a man of many parts. By profession he is a marine specimen dealer in the little cracker fishing village of Panacea in the Florida Panhandle. But his work has opened his eyes to many other things. He is a vigorous defender of environmental quality in a part of Florida generally deficient in conservation activists. Over the years Jack has also become interested in turtles, and now he has put his observations and thoughts on turtles into a superb book. There has been a rash of new turtle books in the last few years, all of them worth reading, but Rudloe's is one of the few that combines genuine literary merit with deep firsthand knowledge of turtles, their ways and the factors that are dragging them towards extinction. Rudloe knows and likes the shrimpers whose trawls are drowning sea turtles all over the world. He works with them and has gradually helped make them aware of the extent of the turtle problem. He - and the reader - suffer as a turtle is slowly and crudely butchered on board a shrimp boat; without excessive anthropomorphism, he tells us of the blood behind the statistics, of turtles that do not die properly even when their throats are cut and their heads twisted off their bodies. Rudloe also has a more than passing interest in what I can only call the mystical aspects of turtles. He explores the widespread myth of the Turtle Mother, and, without actually believing in it, he convinces his readers there must be something in it. The book is utterly readable, and the browsing reader will soon find his attention totally absorbed. He will find little problem in reading the book cover to cover at one sitting, and in so doing will have painlessly acquired a very real and vivid knowledge of what turtles are all about and why we should try to save them.