About the book
In the snowy forests of Primorye, a region of Russia's Far East more than 5,000 miles from Moscow, a man-eating tiger is killing villagers, and its attacks seem to be acts of revenge. John Vaillant reconstructs the winter hunt by a small team of trackers and their dogs, who know the animal is cunning, injured and starving, and must find it before it strikes again. Around that pursuit he builds a portrait of a harsh, remote region and its people, together with the natural history of the tiger itself. The narrative nonfiction account was published in 2010. Vaillant later won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for Fire Weather.
Ryan Holiday named it among his best books of 2011, praising both the chase across post-communist Siberia and its insight into the Russian psyche and the mindset of man against predator.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Ryan Holiday (Founder/Brass Check)
Holy shit, this book is good. Just holy shit. 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 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.
You may have heard about the story on the internet a while back: 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). At one point, the tiger is cornered and leaps to attack the team leader…and in mid-air the soldier’s rifle goes into the tigers open jaws and down his throat all the way to the stock, killing the tiger at the last possible second. The autopsy later revealed that the tiger had been shot something like a dozen times during its life and lived. The story is very similar to that of the Tsavo maneaters, which was turned into the underrated Val Kilmer movie The Ghost and the Darkness.
There are all sorts of well-selected threads from evolutionary psychology and biology in this book and it makes the book a self-educator’s dream. You can pick and choose which ones you want to follow next–trusting safely that the author has pointed you in an interesting and valuable direction. But that’s just the meta-stuff that is a bonus with this book, and it’s worth pointing out only because the rest of the book is just so fucking interesting and exciting.
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