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Summary
Summary
It's December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russia's Far East. The tiger isn't just killing people, it's annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. As the trackers sift through the gruesome remains of the victims, they discover that these attacks aren't random: the tiger is apparently engaged in a vendetta. Injured, starving, and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again.
As he re-creates these extraordinary events, John Vaillant gives us an unforgettable portrait of this spectacularly beautiful and mysterious region. We meet the native tribes who for centuries have worshipped and lived alongside tigers, even sharing their kills with them. We witness the arrival of Russian settlers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, soldiers and hunters who greatly diminished the tiger populations. And we come to know their descendants, who, crushed by poverty, have turned to poaching and further upset the natural balance of the region.
This ancient, tenuous relationship between man and predator is at the very heart of this remarkable book. Throughout we encounter surprising theories of how humans and tigers may have evolved to coexist, how we may have developed as scavengers rather than hunters, and how early Homo sapiens may have fit seamlessly into the tiger's ecosystem. Above all, we come to understand the endangered Siberian tiger, a highly intelligent super-predator that can grow to ten feet long, weigh more than six hundred pounds, and range daily over vast territories of forest and mountain.
Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger circles around three main characters: Vladimir Markov, a poacher killed by the tiger; Yuri Trush, the lead tracker; and the tiger himself. It is an absolutely gripping tale of man and nature that leads inexorably to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the taiga.
Author Notes
John Vaillant is also the author of The Golden Spruce. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside, National Geographic, and Men's Journal, among others. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and children.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The grisly rampage of a man-eating Amur, or Siberian, tiger and the effort to trap it frame this suspenseful and majestically narrated introduction to a world that few people, even Russians, are familiar with. Northeast of China lies Russia's Primorye province, "the meeting place of four distinct bioregions"-taiga, Mongolian steppes, boreal forests, and Korean tropics-and where the last Amur tigers live in an uneasy truce with an equally diminished human population scarred by decades of brutal Soviet politics and postperestroika poverty. Over millennia of shared history, the indigenous inhabitants had worked out a tenuous peace with the Amur, a formidable hunter that can grow to over 500 pounds and up to nine feet long, but the arrival of European settlers, followed by decades of Soviet disregard for the wilds, disrupted that balance and led to the overhunting of tigers for trophies and for their alleged medicinal qualities. Vaillant (The Golden Spruce) has written a mighty elegy that leads readers into the lair of the tiger and into the heart of the Kremlin to explain how the Amur went from being worshipped to being poached. Photos. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Set in Russia's Maritime Territory, Vaillant's story concerns a tiger of the endangered Amur subspecies that killed three hunters in 1997. Expanding from the incidents' central facts, Vaillant's narrative explores humans' relationship with predatory animals in general, with the Amur tiger as the specific example. Literary, folkloric, and scientific sources combine into a deeply sensitive depiction of the tiger's adaptation to its forested, mountainous, and wintry environment. As he recounts how Russians such as the hunters in question also attempt to extract a living from the taiga, possibly including illegal poaching of the tiger, Vaillant posits the tiger's thoughts about the competition, inferring its intelligence from a conservation warden's investigation into the cases of the unfortunate hunters, who were felled in ambush-style attacks. Interest in Vaillant's work, which climaxes in the warden's pursuit of the deadly tiger, will partake of humans' instinctual fear of large carnivores, the modern imperative to preserve them from extinction, and readers of Vaillant's The Golden Spruce (2005), a positively reviewed, deep-drilling work, also about the nexus between humans and the natural world.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE large and malevolent tiger at the center of this nonfiction hunting tale bears a striking resemblance to its fictional seafaring predecessors: the white whale and the movie-star shark (both of which, by the way, are said to have been inspired by real creatures). The structure of John Vaillant's book echoes that of "Moby-Dick," alternating a gripping chase narrative with dense explanations of the culture and ecology surrounding that chase. "Jaws" fans will recognize the dramatic strategy of keeping the beast offstage as much as possible to allow terror to fill in the blanks, as well as a certain lurid detail at the book's end, which I won't reveal. What makes "The Tiger" a grand addition to the animal-pursuit subgenre is the sensitive way in which Vaillant, a journalist and the author of a previous book, "The Golden Spruce," that's in the same murder-in-nature mode, evokes his cat. Few writers have taken such pains to understand their monsters, and few depict them in such arresting prose. Vaillant writes about the difficulty of tracking a tiger that doesn't want to be found: "This was not an animal they followed, but a contradiction, a silence that was at once incarnate and invisible." When the tiger stalks, the book soars; when it hides, the book sags, but only a little. Vaillant is an obsessive researcher who marshals his battalion of facts in service to the story, which is a nice way of saying that some of this book can be rough going, but it's all interesting and it pays off. It's the late 1990s in the Primorye region, on Russia's far eastern border. An area about the size of Washington State, a "meeting place of four distinct bioregions" that include a subtropical forest and the Siberian taiga, the Primorye is home to a human population devastated by the fallout from perestroika, and a few hundred Amur tigers. The largest tiger subspecies, the Amur can survive in virtually any climate, think strategically, rip bears to shreds and eat almost anything. What these tigers don't do, in the Primorye, is eat people. Apparently, they're more into human flesh in parts of India. Go figure. That is, until one very big, very smart animal breaks the Primorye's longstanding people-tiger truce, acquiring a taste for humans and satisfying that taste in ugly fashion. Enter Yuri Trush, the commander of a tiger-preservation team, who must now destroy this tiger. While Trush tries to solve the mystery of where the tiger is, Vaillant tries to solve the mystery of why the tiger went rogue. To do this, he takes the reader deep into the tiger's world, creating an intimate portrait of its inner life. Nonfiction writers usually deal with words and actions, not thoughts. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah for a journalist to tell us what a human is thinking, much less a tiger. But here's where all that research comes in handy. Vaillant knows so much about the Primorye, its tigers and this particular tiger that he's able to draw plausible conclusions. Like this explanation of why the tiger - which is said to have enjoyed lying down on one victim's mattress - awaits its prey in a cabin: "Building on his success with cabin stakeouts and with mattresses, he combined the two here in a way that also warmed him in the process." Vaillant struggles, however, to make the people and the place of the story as vivid as the cat. He seems humbled by the cruel environment he's chosen to work in. The Primorye is just too foreign. The geography remains indistinct, the people remote and with a disorienting thicket of names. In the end, it's the tiger alone that burns bright. Edward Lewine is the author of "Death and the Sun: A Matador's Season in the Heart of Spain."
Choice Review
At first read, The Tiger is a riveting account of a Siberian tiger that crosses a thin line into hunting humans. But the real story is about the tiger-human relationship, conservation efforts, and the failure of humans to check their own self-destructive consumption and expansion. Writer/journalist Vaillant (The Golden Spruce, 2005) takes the reader across millennia of predator-human interaction by focusing on the individuals who protect and those who poach Siberian tigers in the Russian Far East. It is a compelling, complex story of the collision between indigenous people and their knowledge and a colonial, extractive mentality. In this wild area squeezed between China and the Pacific, humanity is losing an extraordinary habitat through a combination of failed conservation policy and an insatiable demand for resources. This tiger's tale illustrates, in very human terms, the history of the Russian Far East, failed post-USSR policies, and the effects of global economic forces on natural resources. The book's journalistic style lends itself to many disciplines; more detailed works in international or Russian policy, natural resource management, conservation, ethnography, and journalism would be useful supplements to this work. Summing Up: Recommended. Academic and general readers, all levels. D. Ostergren Goshen College
Library Journal Review
In the winter of 1997, a huge tiger is stalking-and devouring-hunters on the edge of an isolated Siberian village. Yuri Trush and his team of tiger inspectors are called to the scene to investigate one incident, and ultimately, to determine the tiger's fate. Nature writer Vaillant (The Golden Spruce) follows Trush's team as they track the tiger on foot through dense forest in the bitter cold while documenting the effects of the tiger crisis on the desperately troubled village. What spirits this adventure narrative from compelling to brilliant is Vaillant's use of the tiger hunt as an allegorical lens through which to understand the cultural, economic, and environmental devastation of post-Communist Russia. Vaillant suggests that the lone tiger's desperate acts are merely symptomatic of the larger crisis facing wild tiger populations-and their human counterparts-in contemporary Russia. VERDICT This energetic hybrid of classic adventure and impassioned sociocultural critique will appeal to Jon Krakauer fans, tiger lovers, and readers interested in contemporary Russian history. It might also attract fans of the film The Ghost and the Darkness, based on J.H. Patterson's The Man-Eaters of Tsavo. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/10.]-Kelsy L. Peterson, Overland Park, KS (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.