Enter Yuri Trush, the commander of a tiger-preservation team, who must now destroy this tiger. That is, until one very big, very smart animal breaks the Primorye’s longstanding people-tiger truce, acquiring a taste for humans and satisfying that taste in ugly fashion. Apparently, they’re more into human flesh in parts of India. What these tigers don’t do, in the Primorye, is eat people. The largest tiger subspecies, the Amur can survive in virtually any climate, think strategically, rip bears to shreds and eat almost anything. An area about the size of Washington State, a “meeting place of four distinct bioregions” that include a subtropical forest and the Siberian taiga, the Primorye is home to a human population devastated by the fallout from perestroika, and a few hundred Amur tigers. It’s the late 1990s in the Primorye region, on Russia’s far eastern border. Vaillant is an obsessive researcher who marshals his battalion of facts in service to the story, which is a nice way of saying that some of this book can be rough going, but it’s all interesting and it pays off. When the tiger stalks, the book soars when it hides, the book sags, but only a little. Vaillant writes about the difficulty of tracking a tiger that doesn’t want to be found: “This was not an animal they followed, but a contradiction, a silence that was at once incarnate and invisible.” Few writers have taken such pains to understand their monsters, and few depict them in such arresting prose. What makes “The Tiger” a grand addition to the animal-pursuit subgenre is the sensitive way in which Vaillant, a journalist and the author of a previous book, “The Golden Spruce,” that’s in the same murder-in-nature mode, evokes his cat. “Jaws” fans will recognize the dramatic strategy of keeping the beast offstage as much as possible to allow terror to fill in the blanks, as well as a certain lurid detail at the book’s end, which I won’t reveal. The structure of John Vaillant’s book echoes that of “Moby-Dick,” alternating a gripping chase narrative with dense explanations of the culture and ecology surrounding that chase. The large and malevolent tiger at the center of this nonfiction hunting tale bears a striking resemblance to its fictional seafaring predecessors: the white whale and the movie-star shark (both of which, by the way, are said to have been inspired by real creatures).

The tiger john vaillant review