James Dickey, author of "Deliverance"

"Life flourishes where land and water meet and from there out to where the continent leans into the sea. No one understands this world better of speaks of it with more feeling than Jack Rudloe in "The Wilderness Coast."

Roger Caras, author of "Perfect Harmony"
and Roger Caras' Treasury of Classic Nature Tales

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"Hunting the Toadfish"
by Irma J. Fisk, May 1, 1998

"The Wilderness Coast" is an adventure that carries you deep into its sea-- and landscapes, the sunsets, the storms that glow and glower though its pages...Jack and Anne Rudloe are a team who research and collect sea creatures for scientific, medical and exhibition purposes on the gulf coast of Florida. They have eked out their living with teaching and writing. Their hard and often tedious work, with its dangers and discomforts, has been compensated by the joys and excitements of their accomplishments, which sometimes seem extraordinary, even to them.

Mr. Rudloe recounts these experiences in easy prose, writing as if being enveloped in mosquitoes, in silver schools of fish, in an electric storm far from help were the most natural events.... Without leaving my living room, I move e into a new world described in language I can understand and enjoy."

"He's different, Jack Rudloe is.

Some folks say he's the most hated man in Wakulla County. (You get the feeling that the only thing that protects outspoken environmentalists in the Panhandle is the bag limit."

But he is also a bring-'em back-alive adventurer who will wrestle an eight-foot sawfish or a giant Suriname toadfish.

He' is a scientists, too, trying to unravel the mysteries of turtle migrations and horseshoe crab hatchlings.

He is also a swamp denizen, beachcomber, college dropout and former shrimper. But in his latest book, "The Wilderness Coast," he proves that he is story teller.

And his ability to tell stories about the fertile strip where sea meets land makes him a treasure for Floridians. Anybody who has every collected lightening bugs in a mayonnaise jar or sloshed into a ditch in search of minnows, crabs and crawfish will enjoy meeting him.

Rudloe makes his home in Panacea, 25 miles south of Tallahassee on the Gulf Coast. He makes ends meet by operating Gulf Specimen Co., a commercial biological-supply outfit that furnishes aquatic and marine creatures to labs and museums all over the country.

This book, his fifth, is his celebration of things that range from eight-foot barracuda to fried mullet gizzards.

We start out slogging through the needlerush flats near Panacea with Rudloe and his wife Anne, who holds a doctorate in biology from Florida State University. Rudloe weaves back and forth between telling us about the coast he loves and about the specifics of seining this ditch x for grass shrimp. The discourse on the wilderness coast ends when a five and a half foot alligator turns up in the grass shrimp net.

Later we paddle 217 miles down the Suwanneee River. At the river's mouth Rudloe takes us out with a Cracker fisherman to meet a fat school of mullet.

In another chapter, there is a voyage on the Dena Dini, an ancient leaky shrimp boat Rudloe has commandeered to explore the mysterious feeding grounds of the electric ray. The rays, which can administer a shark-jolting shock, congregate in West Pass-- a series of muddy gullies where Apalachicola Bay empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Rudloe ships them to medical researchers who use the ray's nerves for studies on Alzheimer's disease.

There are some tales that are almost beyond believe, one in which Rudloe attacks an alligator with his bare hands after the gator grabs his dog, and another in which Rudloe swears he sees the Indian spirits while camped out on a prehistoric midden on the Suwannee.

Tucked within this wonderful takes is a conflict that Rudloe acknowledges. Here is an ardent perhaps strident, environmentalist who survives by taking living things out of their world.

You can argue, probably correctly, that having a giant toadfish on display at the New York Aquarium stirs in Homo sapiens a wonder at the variety of life on the planet. You can further argue that educating our own species is the only way to save the world's rare and beautiful creatures.

But I don't think you could convince the toadfish.

And I wonder whether Rudloe is 100 percent comfortable with it. He is a complicated person.

And for that reason, one of the most fascinating creatures in the book is the handle Paradox who wrote it."

Additional Reviews of "The Wilderness Coast" Appeared In:

Atlanta Journal, The Boston Globe, Florida Flambeau, Florida Geographer, Fort Myers Beach Observer, Island Reporter (Hilton Head), Kirkus, Library Journal, Miami Herald, Nature Book Society, New York Times, Outside Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, Tallahassee Democrat, Tampa Tribune Times, Times Picayune, Underwater Naturalist and the Wakulla News.