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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.
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Creators
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Awards
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Release date
August 24, 2010 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780307715104
- File size: 348490 KB
- Duration: 12:06:01
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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According to author John Vaillant, tigers are smart, powerful, and capable of revenge. Vaillant chronicles the story of an Amur tiger who, in 1997, ravaged a remote Russian village in what Vaillant suggests was a vendetta against those who threatened its survival. Vaillant details historical accounts of early hunters in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who nearly annihilated the tiger population, the tribes who managed to live side-by-side with and even worshipped the tigers, and the contemporary hunters who must track and kill this particular man-eater. Vaillant's reading is completely engaging, containing all the intensity listeners could hope for without ever overstepping into gratuitous emotionalism. A fine reading of an incredible true story. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from May 17, 2010
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.
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