![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Vaillant’s careful brushstrokes of this backdrop offer up a profoundly clear understanding of how the dualities of the world - the meek and the fierce, the predator and the prey, the haves and have-nots - are intricately, exquisitely bound to one another. ![]() It is credit to the animal that it has survived at all in a landscape bearing the fresh scars of political oppression and the resulting economic impoverishment - especially given the lust of the neighboring Chinese for Amur tigers’ parts, from penis to paw. Vaillant’s intimate portrait of this animal is one part deftly delivered, seamlessly amalgamated journalism to two parts brutally beautiful prose and storytelling prowess - and it renders in our imaginations a creature so calculatingly cunning (at the home of one victim, the big cat drags a mattress outside and lounges on it while waiting for its next victim to return home), and so powerful, it can take down the Russian brown bear, cousin to North America’s grizzly. JOHN VAILLANT’S TALE of a beast that methodically stalked, killed, and devoured a post-perestroika poacher in the southeast corner of Russia makes it clear why William Blake’s most widely anthologized poems pit God’s lamb not against a lion, but a tiger. ![]()
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