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.
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. 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. I’ve created a list of 15 books you’ve never heard of that will alter your worldview and help you excel at your career.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. The book is a blend of adventure story, police procedural, history/biology text, mystery, and environmental awareness manual. (Runner up: Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson is amazing.) I’ve recommended this book to thousands of people and have heard countless times how much they loved it. 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. When Trush and his men climbed down from the Kung, they heard the crows' raucous kvetching concentrated just west of the entrance road. The story is nuts: a tiger starts killing people in Russia and a team is sent to kill it (Russia is so fucked up, they already have a team for this). Carrion crows will follow a tiger the same way seagulls follow a fishing boat: by sticking with a proven winner, they conserve energy and shift the odds of getting fed from If to When. The author explains the Russian psyche, the psyche of man vs predator, the psyches of primitive peoples and animals, in such a masterful way that you’re shocked to find 1) that he knows this, and 2) that he fit it all into this readable and relatively short book. The Tiger is nature writing of the highest order and more it’s also a meditation on perestroika gone wrong, what it takes to keep a region going, and the relationship between predator and prey.
Even if it was just the main narrative–the chase to kill a man-eating Tiger in Siberia in post-communist Russia–it would be worth reading, but it is so much more than that.
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant - Damn this book is good.
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