The Tiger
A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
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3.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
**From the author of the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction winning Fire Weather**
'An unbelievable tale, expertly told' Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain
'A superb book ' Daily Mail · 'Masterful . . . mesmerising, rangy and relentless' Sunday Telegraph
A man-eating tiger is hunting villagers in the snowy forests of Far Eastern Russia.
A small team of men and their dogs must hunt the tiger in turn. As evidence mounts, it becomes clear that the tiger's attacks aren't random: it is seeking revenge. Injured, starving and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again.
As he tracks the tiger's deadly progress, John Vaillant draws an unforgettable portrait of a distant and brutal region, over 5,000 miles from Moscow. In the harsh depths of winter in Primorye, a gripping tale of man and nature unfolds.
'Exciting, memorable - and perfectly, impeccably right . . . a tale of astonishing power and vigour' Simon Winchester, author of The Surgeon of Crowthorne
'Extraordinary . . . a brilliantly told tale of man and nature' New York Review of Books
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
