Tigers in Red Weather - Hardcover

Padel Ruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316726001 ISBN 13: 9780316726009

Publisher: Little, Brown, 2005

Synopsis

After a terrible year, the end of a five-year affair and the death of her father, Ruth Padel wants out from normal life and happens across an advert for a trip to India. She visits a tiger reserve - and so begins a remarkable journey and an obsession. She travels across the world, Bhutan to Siberia, China to Sumatra, into jungles and into myths, in search of tigers: the most beautiful, and one of the most endangered, animals in the world. In every jungle, among the snakes, scorpions and animals living their secret lives, she meets "defenders of the wild", scientists, guards and conservationists struggling to protect forest animals from armed poachers, live electrocuting fences, poisoning. As she becomes more passionately interested in her elusive subject, she contemplates the meaning of obsession: where it takes us, how it shapes us. Indeed, it is our obsession with tigers that has brought them to the edge of extinction. Tigers stalk the pages of this book more vividly than in any wildlife programme. Both a captivating piece of natural history and a beautiful piece of travel literature, Tigers in Red Weather is also an absorbing exploration of obsession, and of the human heart.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet, journalist and broadcaster - and the great, great granddaughter of Charles Darwin. She lives in North London with her daughter.

Review

'Tigers in Red Weather describes an extraordinary quest for the tiger in its forest home and in the human imagination. Padel is not a descendant of Charles Darwin for nothing. Her curiosity is daring and rigorous, her language eloquent. This is not only a superb portrait of Asian tiger country, but also of the fears and longings that the tiger creates in human hearts' Helen Dunmore 'Tigers in Red Weather is a beautifully strange and personal travel book, one that might bring Joan Didion or Bruce Chatwin to mind, a book about love and survival that reads like a well-tuned poem. Ruth Padel has never written better, and that's saying something.' Colm Toibin 'I loved the book. But with shock, despair and urgency it zeroes in on the greatest wildlife tragedy and scandal of our times, the tiger's last-ditch battle for survival in the wild. Here are passionate, brutally honest dispatches from that struggle's bloodsoaked front lines' Mark Shand

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316726001
• ISBN 13: 9780316726009
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448