Tigers In The Snow - Softcover

Matthiessen, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865475962 ISBN 13: 9780865475960

Publisher: North Point Press, 2001

Synopsis

No more than a few thousand tigers survive in pockets of Asia, a continent they once roamed far and wide. The largest of them, the Siberian tiger, is today almost entirely confined to the little-populated Russian Far East, a region that may offer the species' best hope for survival. But the implosion of the Soviet Union intensified poaching and habitat depredation, prompting a group of Russian researchers and U.S. wildlife biologists led by Maurice Hornocker to join forces to stave off extinction.

Peter Matthiessen brings to the Siberian tiger the deep knowledge of and feeling for the natural world that have made classics of his previous books. Accompanying researchers into the field, he allows the reader to participate vicariously in the battle for the tiger's future. Along the way, he tells how the species evolved and evokes its crucial, often totemic role in human cultures and mythologies. He has made of the tiger's dilemma a drama-underscored by Hornocker's one-of-a-kind photographs-that conveys powerfully what a loss to our collective imagination the disappearance of these great cats would be.

About this title

Review

Indigenous to Asia, and once widely distributed across the continent, the tiger is yet another of the world's creatures to come perilously close to extinction in the last century. Where a hundred years ago the population of Panthera tigris and its cousins stood at more than 100,000, a 1995 census put the total at less than 5,000. And, writes Peter Matthiessen, a longtime student and champion of endangered wildlife, "most biologists and conservationists ... would set that number even lower."

Working with the noted wildlife biologist and photographer Maurice Hornocker, Matthiessen recounts his travels into the Russian Far East and Manchuria in search of one of the rarest of the big cats, Panthera tigris altaica, the Siberian tiger. Once shielded, and not by design, by Communist policies that restricted travel in and development of its wilderness habitat, the Siberian tiger is increasingly threatened throughout much of its range as the dense old-growth forests of the Pacific seaboard fall to Japanese logging companies; at the same time, the tiger is still hunted for parts used by Chinese apothecaries (drinking the essence of a tiger is thought to bring renewed sexual vigor to aging men). Matthiessen, whose text brims with a righteous rage on the tiger's behalf, is able to report a few success stories, as Russian, Chinese, and American biologists work to conserve habitat in the wild country memorialized by V.K. Arseniev's Dersu the Trapper, a memoir that informs Matthiessen's own book. But his book is also full of tragedy, of terrible stories that help press a case for why the Siberian tiger should be protected everywhere in its domain.

Matching a thoughtful, well-crafted text with remarkable photographs of tigers in the wild, this is a book that, with luck, will help spur renewed interest in making the world safe for wildlife of all kinds. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author

Peter Mathiessen is the author of The Snow Leopard and numerous other works of nonfiction and fiction, most recently Bone by Bone.

Maurice Hornocker is a co-founder of the Siberian Tiger Project, a senior conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and director of the Hornocker Wildlife Institute

About this edition

• Publisher: North Point Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0865475962
• ISBN 13: 9780865475960
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208