This is an auction for THE TIGER by John Vaillant.

Subtitled "A True Story of Vengeance and Survival".

"The grisly rampage of a man-eating Amur, or Siberian, tiger and the effort to trap it frame this suspenseful and majestically narrated introduction to a world that few people, even Russians, are familiar with. Northeast of China lies Russia's Primorye province, "the meeting place of four distinct bio-regions" –taiga, Mongolian steppes, boreal forests, and Korean tropics - and where the last Amur tigers live. Over millennia the indigenous inhabitants had worked out a tenuous peace with the Amur, a formidable hunter that can grow to over 500 pounds and up to nine feet long, but the arrival of European settlers, followed by decades of Soviet disregard for the wilds, disrupted that balance and led to the hunting of tigers for trophies and for their alleged medicinal qualities. Vaillant has written a mighty elegy that leads readers into the lair of the tiger to explain how the Amur went from being worshipped to being poached."

• a *** starred *** review in Publishers Weekly (US)

Amazon.com review:

"Outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East a man-eating tiger is on the prowl. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s murdering them, almost as if it has a vendetta. A team of trackers is dispatched to hunt the tiger before it strikes again. They know the creature is cunning, injured, and starving, making it even more dangerous. As Vaillant re-creates these extraordinary events, he gives us an unforgettable and masterful work of narrative nonfiction that combines a riveting portrait of a stark and mysterious region of the world and its people, with the natural history of nature’s most deadly predator."

More very favourable reviews on Amazon.com.

Paperback 2010.

506 pages.

Near new condition.

The cost of shipping is $4.95.

There is of course no charge for shipping if you collect this book from my shop in Palmerston North following the auction.

Payment within seven days, please.