About the Book
A Chicago Tribune Most-Anticipated Book of the Season
The thrilling saga of the great Amur tiger and the scientists who came together, across the world, to save it.
The forests of northeast Asia are home to a marvelous range of animals--fish owls and brown bears, musk deer and moose, wolves and raccoon dogs, leopards and tigers. But by the final years of the Cold War, only a few hundred tigers stepped quietly through the snow of the Amur River basin. Soon, the Soviet Union fell, bringing catastrophe; without the careful oversight of a central authority, poaching and logging took a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species.
Just as these changes arrived, scientists came together to found the Siberian Tiger Project. Led by Dale Miquelle, a moose researcher, and Zhenya Smirnov, a mouse biologist, the team captured and released more than 114 tigers over three decades. They witnessed mating rituals and fights, hunting and feeding, the ceding and taking of territory, the creation of families.
Within these pages, characters--both feline and human--come fully alive as we travel with them through the quiet and changing forests of Amur. We travel across time, too, as the fate of the species has been shaped by the history and politics of empires--such as the Qing dynasty's Willow Palisade, which once slowed human settlement, or the later introduction of roads through Russian reserves. The Siberian Tiger Project became the longest-running tiger research initiative; its work continues to guide conservationists today. Jonathan C. Slaght's Tigers Between Empires is the thrilling saga of the great Amur tiger and the scientists who came together, across the world, to save it.
About the Author :
Jonathan C. Slaght is the author of Owls of the Eastern Ice, which won the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction and was long-listed for the National Book Award. He is the regional director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Temperate Asia Program, where he oversees strategic conservation planning in China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Russia, and Central Asia. He published an annotated translation of Across the Ussuri Kray by Vladimir Arsenyev and cotranslated Winter Ecology of the Amur Tiger by A. G. Yudakov and I. G. Nikolaev. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Scientific American, and on the BBC and NPR. He lives in Minneapolis.
Review :
"Pure widescreen epic."
--Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
"Captivating . . . Slaght brings [the tigers'] stories to life on the page with vivid detail and suspense . . . A hopeful celebration of the fight to save a vulnerable species."
--Publishers Weekly
"A well-crafted story of a successful conservation effort, against all the odds . . . [A] fluent narrative . . . as much about human history as it is about wild cats."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Immersive [and] . . . compelling . . . Informative and engaging . . . A well-researched and well-written account spanning the 35-year history of the Siberian Tiger Project that blends personal stories, conservation, and field work on an iconic species."
--Library Journal
"Tigers Between Empires is a riveting account of survival in the face of long odds, beautifully written and unforgettable. Jonathan C. Slaght introduces researchers consumed by fieldwork, as well as individual tigers as full actors in their own story, showing how the team struggles to live another day while providing knowledge that might help tigers gain a lasting foothold in a landscape filled with dangers."
--Andrea Pitzer, author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
"There is no beast on Earth more formidable, more magnificent, more improbable-seeming than the Amur tiger, standing in the snows of the Russian Far East. This is the saga of that animal, and of the heroic wildlife biologists who have long worked to understand and protect it. Jonathan C. Slaght tells the tale from deep knowledge, in rich detail, with high skill."
--David Quammen, author of Breathless
"This feast of a book is as rare a creature as the animals, people, and wild places it brings to life: it's an epic and breathless adventure, stuffed with campfire stories, laughs, brushes with death, and the deep history of a place so rich and strange it seems conjured from ancient myths. If you liked Owls of the Eastern Ice, you'll love this return to the Sikhote-Alin with the plucky, half-mad Russians and Americans who risked their lives to save the greatest of the great cats."
--Jonathan Meiburg, author of A Most Remarkable Creature
"A huge adventure at the frontiers of conservation, a whole hidden world, meticulously described, poised on the very edges of the wild, and repeatedly made searingly alive by the majestic animals at its heart."
--Adam Nicolson, author of Bird School
