Beware the Tiger

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed reading this book. I will say that some of the descriptions of the victims were hard to read, but overall I was impressed with how restrained Vaillant was in these passages. It would have been easy to over-describe, but he maintained respect for the deceased. It was a little hard to follow the book as it skipped back and forth in time and around in geography. I know that some readers cannot stand books that do that and they will not like that in this book. This technique doesn't really bother me, but it was sort of distracting. Given the real paucity of data on the actual events, the need to fill out the book with the background was real and interspersing the background with the events kept me reading through all of the data. I'm sure I retained more of the background than I would have if there would have been an extensive background separate from the event descriptions. The background research was very thorough and made the book much more than a voyeuristic journey of gore. I knew that tigers were endangered and that man was the primary reason for that, but it was very interesting to see just how our economic journey impacts the tigers. All in all, a very worthwhile read!



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