Tigers Between Empires - by Jonathan C Slaght (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A Best Book of the Year: Scientific American, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, CounterPunch, The Telegraph, BookPage
A Chicago Tribune Most-Anticipated Book of the Season

"Epic . . . Slaght again shines his scientific-yet-soulful spotline on one of the world's most amazing creatures . . . [A] fascinating survival-revival tale." --Michiela Thuman, The Minnesota Star Tribune

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.

Review Quotes

"Wild and delightful . . . Tigers is a book not just about animal conservation but about
the bonds conservation can forge between humans."
--Sulmaan Wasif Khan, The New Republic

"Pure widescreen epic."
--Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune

"A heart-in-your-mouth saga . . . Riveting."
--Dan Vergano, Scientific American

"Weaving together history and folklore, scientific discovery and wilderness adventure, [Tigers Between Empires] is equal parts educational and exhilarating as it transports readers to Russia's formidable, freezing and remote Far East to save the world's largest big cat from rampant poaching and logging."
--Rebecca Cairns, CNN

"Slaght has a marvelous gift for putting the reader right inside the expeditions . . . [An] enthralling and, yes, inspiring story."
--Jim Kelly, Air Mail

"Compelling . . . [An] impressive addition to recent literature on big cat conservation."
--Jonathan Guthrie, Financial Times

"Remarkable . . . Part travelogue, part natural history, and part adventure tale . . . Lyrical and evocative."
--Deborah Mason, BookPage

"Exhilarating . . . Slaght not only has the skills of an intrepid wildlife adventurer, but also necessary gifts of description and advocacy to make it real."
--Ann Kjellberg, Book Post

"Fascinating and important . . . Slaght vividly evokes [an] astonishing landscape . . . A beautiful demonstration of how conservation efforts depend on local communities and political will."
--Ruth Padel, Literary Review

"Jonathan Slaght is no novice in this wilderness of wildernesses . . . He knows the terrain, the little towns and the people, and captures the textures of everything brilliantly . . . It feels as though reading [Tigers Between Empires] is itself a contribution to the tiger-saving efforts."
--Strong Words

"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 thirty-five-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

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.