LISTEN to an interview with John Vaillant:

(press the play button above)

_____

READ Jonathan Bastian’s review of ‘The Tiger’:

You have to imagine the location.

You are 6,000 miles to the east of Moscow, nearly a quarter-way around the world, but still technically in Russia. To the south is China. Japan is just off the coast.

This is an area known as Primorski Krai.

Walk through the dark forests and you’ll see many unusual things: species of the boreal subarctic overlapping with species of the subtropics. In other words you have caribou and Timberwolves mingling with leopards and tigers and poisonous snakes.

Equally mysterious is an animal that most people never see — an animal that is perhaps symbolic of the entire region. Silent, vast, fierce, adaptive, the Siberian (Amur) tiger is chillingly mystical.

They are the stuff of myth, legend, fable. Many people living in the Primorski Krai will never see an Amur tiger, even though they know the tigers are out there, hunting, watching, waiting.

These, to me, are the fascinating elements of John Vaillant’s “The Tiger.” But at the same time, they are not why the book will most likely become a consistent bestseller.

There is also the commercial angle, which is why Brad Pitt has already purchased the movie rights to the book: In 1997, one of these Amur Tigers began luridly killing a group of humans.

John Vaillant is a smart guy. His previous book, “The Golden Spruce,” is becoming a classic to the outdoorsy set. He is not interested in Hollywood or bestsellers. He’s more interested in quality and the context in which he presents his subject. Which makes me wonder whether Vaillant was really interested in the commerciality of the story, or if he felt that exploring the more profound aspects of the story would be too esoteric without a little drama?

For example, there is a blurb on the back of the book by George Schaller, who traveled with Peter Matthiessen in “The Snow Leopard.” Schaller is a legendary hard-ass who is not interested in fluff. I also know that Vaillant looks up to Schaller tremendously and reveres “The Snow Leopard.”

At the same time, Random House (the publisher of “The Tiger”) is using trashy mystery/thriller language to promote the book: “It’s December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl. …The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s annihilating them.” I can just imagine Vaillant reading this when the book was first printed, and maybe throwing up in his mouth a little bit.

Why? Because Vaillant is trying to take the conversation deeper. Early in the book Vaillant even writes, “The tiger has been a fellow traveler in our evolution, and, in a sense, our peer. In Asia, there is no recess of human memory in which there has not — somewhere — lurked a tiger. As a result, this animal looms over the collective imagination of native and newcomers alike.”

This I like more. I mean, have you even seen one of these tigers, even if only in a zoo? They generate such feelings of awe and fear that they become nearly biblical. Their strength is beyond our comprehension. Their ability to take life is staggering. In this way, we have come to revere these animals the way we revere higher powers, deities, gods. It makes complete sense to have people worshipping these animals — to see them inscribed on caves and carved in trees.

Vaillant understands our devotional attachment to these tigers through our evolution. In order to stay alive and coexist, we’ve been forced to treat these animals with fear and respect, and that’s been happening for thousands of years. For this reason, they been emblazoned in our collective minds and myths.

But this is changing. Now we kill the tigers for money. We drive them to the brink of extinction. The Chinese will pay filthy amounts of money to smuggle them across the Russian border.

Lets us hope that those creatures find a way to survive. Because when they die, a part of our humanity will die with them.

-Jonathan Bastian (host of ‘Page by Page’)