Customer Reviews

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Borzoi Books)

5 star:		(82)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Someone asked me recently what sort of non-fiction I like to read, and I had to think about it. I have a few niche areas that I enjoy, but generally all I ask of a book is that it keep me engaged and give me something to think about. This approach means that I read a lot of books in areas where I have no expertise and little real interest, merely because someone did a great job of presenting the material and I got hooked. "The Tiger" is one of these books.

Primarily it's the story of a tiger, hungry, injured, and irritated, which starts killing off the members of a Russian community, and of the men tasked with tracking the tiger and killing it. But there's a lot more here, too: interesting background on tigers and other animals, and how they hunt; the culture of the Russian Far East, including issues surrounding the Chinese-Russian border; the effects of perestroika on poorer Russians. And it's all woven together in a manner that made me want to keep reading.

I was particularly intrigued by how recent the events in the story are, being from the late 1990s. The people depicted are clearly on the fringes of Russian society, living literally hand to mouth just to stay alive. That someone could have a TV and other modern conveniences, and still rely for their survival on hunting small game and gathering pine cones, was not something that had occurred to me. Also interesting were the observations on how, through many years, tigers and people have lived together peacefully in the Far East, yet in a balance so fragile that either may be forced to hunt the other just to survive. And of course there are some fascinating statistics on tigers, both their declining numbers, and their physical abilities.

While this book is footnoted and has an extensive bibliography, I would suggest it for anyone who simply likes a good adventure story. It's a great read!

This is far more than just an animal-eats-man thriller like Alaska Bear Tales. It does have a rather small story of a man eating tiger terrorizing a community, but it balloons out, covering all the eddies of history, natural history, economics, and culture that moved the characters to this moment where their worlds collide.

The story could easily be covered in 160 words on page two of a newspaper as some AP wire from Russia. Or in a narrative book it would take maybe 20 pages or so pages. But here the author brings nearly every back story to light in an amazing parade and alignment of stars that borders on fate. The Soviets annexing Northern Manchuria, Defending it from China, bringing Russians to the far East, the crumbling of Soviet systems, the crippling impoverishment of the community, the open markets to the South, the Chinese appetite for tiger products... Everything lines up to bring this confrontation in a way too clear cut for fiction.

I will not say that this book is a slow read, because I had problems putting it down, but at times it was frustrating that the core story of the tiger never seemed to move closer. It reads like a local history text, a biographic series of many of the main characters and a natural history account of tigers all blended together. I don't think I have ever come away from a book feeling like I knew the context of events better. The image created of post Perestroika Russia alone is worth the price of the book.

However, I can see some people being turned off by all the detours and side streets the book takes. This is not a straight narrative. By the time I knew the end was near, I felt almost like the hunters tracking the tiger, just willing the confrontation to come. And the climax was worth it. The author uses cinematic timing and fated suspense right up to the last moment.

I highly recommend it. Not as a riveting storyline, but much more - a riveting, all encompassing history. Occasionally the auther went a little over the top with his description of tigers, but I can never look at a tiger in a zoo the same way again.

The remarkable thing about John Vaillant's The Tiger is not that it's a total page-turner, or that he manages to stuff the Tiger with so much fascinating natural and political history that you come away with three or four points added to your IQ, or that his lush descriptions are sensuous without being cloying and muscular without being macho, or that his characters are indelible and engaging and worthy of The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare, or even that the tiger and its hunters will relentlessly stalk your consciousness when you aren't reading the book (quite a trick in attention-challenged times). It's that you will, without even knowing it, and even if you don't want to, find yourself suddenly occupying the tiger's world, and seeing it through his eyes, feeling its wounds and its anguish and its hatred, and, above all, rooting for it against your fellow humans. Let this book hunt you down and pounce on you. You won't regret it.

This is a very well-researched account of the hunt for a tiger that was terrorizing a remote Russian community in the Far East in 1997. In the wake of perestroika and the fall of the Communist regime, the economy of the former Soviet Union cratered, and plenty of people in the far-flung territories out past Siberia were reduced to a subsistence level of living, taking to the forests to poach game and forage for natural resources coveted by the nearby Chinese. Some turned to hunting the local Amur tigers, all parts of which would fetch a high price across the border. Consequently it was inevitable that conflicts between man and tiger would arise.

The problem with this account is that there is not a whole lot that can be known for certain about the tiger's attacks and about the actions and intentions of the victims prior to their deaths. As there were no witnesses, it remains uncertain what all parties involved, the tiger and its forest-haunting human prey, were up to over the course of the few days of the predator's brief reign of terror. As a result, the author is reduced to a great deal of conjecture and speculation. Worse, because of this absence of solid evidence, he's forced into endless digressions to pad out the story. There's plenty of material about other tiger-human interactions and folklore and research across the centuries, and efforts at conservation, and the lifestyles of Russian poachers and even of rogue Germans in hiding in Namibia in WWII. And every figure involved in the hunt for the killer tiger, no matter how inconsequential or tangential to the core of the story, gets a capsule biography.

Also troubling is the author's propensity to ascribe feelings and motivations to this particular tiger. I don't hew to the scientific school that denies that animals have any emotions and that they are driven purely by instinct and ingrained behavioral patterns, but I feel the author goes a little too far in crediting the tiger with a rich and complex inner life that verges on the metaphysical.

Still, this is a relatively intriguing story and is definitely thoroughly documented and seems to have involved a lot of personal investigation. It drags a little at the end and seems a bit anti-climactic, but it's heartfelt and tackles some important issues about our responsibility to stop wiping out various species. If nothing else, it also serves as an interesting glimpse into the chaos and despair of pre-Putin Russia, so it's a valuable book for that at least.

The Tiger was excellent but the narrative surrounding the relationship between the tiger and its victims is only part of this book. Much of it is spent on the landscape, cultural examinations, and on the personal history of the people involved. The description gives the idea that this will be a story about renegade tiger attacks and the hunt for that tiger. There is a lot more here, the information about the attacks is spotty and fills but a portion of the book.

However, The Tiger is still great. The author takes a documentary approach but has a wonderfully desciptive and insightful style that provides a rich understanding not only of the events but their context. Vaillant does a masterful job of drawing out the personalities of the actors and making them come alive for the reader. You can visualize the people, the landscape, and feel the conditions in which they have to exist. This is more than a tiger story, it is an examination of the relationship between man, a stark and challenging environment, and another highly intelligent predator that shares it with him. Vaillant has tremendous empathy for all the actors involved, despite a strongly realistic outlook, and you will be able to feel the story as though you were a part of it. I highly recommend it.

"The Tiger" was an amazing piece of non-fiction that is a great example of what really good non-fiction should be. First there was the basis for the book --- the man-eating Siberian tiger and the investigative team that began tracing its actions. But then John Vaillant goes so much further -- his reader learns about the region's history and biology, the place of the Siberian tiger in nature, superstition, and the lives of the people who live in the area, and so much more! And best of all, the entire time I was learning about all of the crucial background information, Vaillant was seamlessly sliding back and forth into the primary narrative. This is a great book that gave me a window into an unexpectedly rich animal and environment that I'd never thought much of -- I recommend it very highly.

The Tiger by John Vailiant is described as the story of a man-eating tiger on the prowl outside a small Siberian village in 1997. That's enough to get your attention but there is more, much more, to this book. This tiger basically destroys people and seems to engage in vendettas against particular individuals. The tiger must be stopped, and that job falls to a small team of hunters and their dogs who track the tiger through deep forest in snow and in temperatures often staying in a range of thirty to forty degrees below zero.

When you finish the book, you will know a lot more about tigers in this relatively unknown corner of the world than you knew before. Their physical powers are unbelievably impressive. The tigers are huge and correspondingly immensely strong. As if that weren't enough, they also have very quick reflexes and an amazing ability to hide. However, the key impression that the author left with me is that the tigers can think and plot and scheme. This makes them truly scary creatures.

A good deal of the book is also devoted to describing the living conditions in that part of the world, the history of the region, the political and government influences, and the extremes the people must go to simply to survive day by day, Some of this bogs things down a bit. I always wanted to get back to the tiger.

On the whole, this book is an excellent effort by Mr. Vailiant, particularly the parts of the story that focus on the tiger and the hunt.

This is a fascinating true story of the environmental and economic forces that bring man and tiger into conflict, but it ranges too far in trying to bring these threads together. The basic story is pretty simple: post-perestroika poverty in southeast Russia combines with Chinese demand for natural resources and exotic animals to incentivize poaching and other environmental depredation. This, in turn, leads to scenarios in which the tiger sometimes wins, at least temporarily. In this particular case, a tiger kills and eats a poacher who had shot it. Injured and unable to hunt its normal prey, it kills and eats another human before it is killed by authorities.

Pros:
(1) All you ever wanted to know about human-tiger relations, from prehistory forward.
(2) All you ever wanted to know about the effects of communism and perestroika on south-eastern Russia.
(3) Sympathetic presentation of all the actors. The abject poverty of many of the humans involved makes it easier to understand why they did the things they did.

Cons:
(1) See #1 and #2 above, "and more". The story is stretched thin by too much backstory about too many people and human-tiger encounters. These digressions hurt the flow.
(2) As the book progresses, the tiger is presented as a sort of demiurge, exercising supernatural power over the actions of the humans.

Negatives aside, the book is still worth a read.

At its core, The Tiger is a simple story of a man-eating tiger and the efforts to stop it before it kills again. But, Vaillant isn't satisfied with just telling that simple story. As he did in The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, Vaillant uses the core story to explore the sociological, anthropological, political, biological, and environmental aspects that have an influence on the basic story. Unfortunately, this holistic approach, which worked so well in The Golden Spruce, doesn't work as well in The Tiger. The reason the approach falls short is due to the nature of the basic story. In The Golden Spruce, the core story is comprised of a single act (the cutting of the tree referenced in the book's title). Thus, the book's additional information provided the reader a valuable context for the act. In the Tiger, the core story is made up of three (arguably, four) acts. Thus, the extra material inserted between the main story's acts breaks up that story's flow, thereby diminishing the power of both the main story and the information that provides a holistic context.

Despite its problems, The Tiger is still an informative book. Vaillant combines Jon Krakauer's kinetic prose with Erik Larson's obsessive detail to create an assertive, almost aggressive, writing style that keeps the reader's attention while imparting information. Consequently, it's impossible to read Vaillant and not have learned something new. Still, by trying too hard to provide a complete picture, Vaillant loses most of the readability needed to make the information memorable. The Tiger is by no means a bad book; but, it's certainly below the standards that Vaillant set with his previous work.

This book ended up being a disappointment for me. I feel that the description is inaccurate. I was under the impression that this was a story about a vengeful tiger and the tale of what the humans went through to take care of the menace.
So is the book about what it says. Yes and no. The story of the tiger is mixed in with a whole lot of history not always related to the tiger. Now there is nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want in your book. I was not looking for a history lesson. I was hoping for a edge of my book page scary tale about a vengeful tiger. Not a history lesson on things other than the tiger. I found some of the history stuff to be boring. Some interesting. It felt like all this additional info. was filler to make a longer book. The actual full story of the hunt for the terrorizing tiger is rather short. The parts about the tiger are excellent.
Overall I'd say if you want to read about the tiger tale only, you will not be happy with this book at all. On the other hand, if you are a history buff, I believe you will enjoy this book immensely. It wasn't a book for me.