What does the book as a whole suggest about our relationship to nature, particularly to the animals that share the earth with us? Mixing adventure, social history, and animal psychology, John Vaillant’s The Tiger focuses on the killing of Vladimir Markov to tell a much larger story about the long, complicated, and sometimes terrifying relationship between humans and tigers. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Up ahead, the tiger’s tracks showed plainly in the snow, brought into sharp relief by the shadows now pooling within them. Their twenty-year-old truck was nicknamed a Kung, and it was the Russian army's four-ton equivalent to the Unimog and the Humvee. Primorye (Pri- mor -ya) is, among other things, the last stronghold of the Siberian tiger, and the official on the line had some disturbing news: a man had been attacked near Sobolonye, a small logging community located in the deep forest, sixty miles northeast of Luchegorsk. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. You get used to that, but it is a surely avoidable annoyance, which would not happen in a printed book.They were about fifty miles from the nearest paved road and a couple of hard-won miles east of Sobolonye when they crossed a wide and improbably located gravel highway.

The pursuit culminates in a breathtaking stand-off of man versus cat in a forest clearing - a denouement every bit as explosive and surprising as the raid in Abbottabad earlier this week. The Tiger is a riveting book, with the momentum of a thriller and the depth of insight of an extended philosophical meditation. 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.I guess the outcome was inevitable, but the way the story was written really added to the suspense when the tiger was being tracked. He also studied karate, aikido, and knife handling; in these, his rangy build works to his advantage because his long reach makes it nearly impossible to get at him. It was also equipped with a woodstove so that, even in the face of total mechanical failure, the crew could survive no matter where in the wilderness they happened to be. my two and a half year old has been enjoying this book for almost a year now and doesn't get tired of it.

The closest material evidence was Markov’s friend who could only hear the threatening growls from the site . Save for the movements of the dog and the men, the forest has gone absolutely still; even the crows have withdrawn, waiting for this latest disturbance to pass. Sleek, powerful and mysterious, the tiger is revered as a potent symbol of sexuality, ferocity and magic in many cultures around the world, yet the tiger’s strength and beauty has also been its downfall: nearly every part of the tiger has a value to poachers.What elevates The Tiger from adventure yarn to nonfiction classic is Vaillant's mastery of language. Not so incidentally, if ever a nonfiction author has used the techniques of fiction any better to recount a real-life narrative, it is difficult to imagine who that author would be. Trush approached this tangled skein of information like a detective: somewhere in here was a beginning and an end, and somewhere, too, was a motive—perhaps several. This book was recommended by Chris Packham, so on that basis alone I purchased a copy for my Kindle.