Tigers In The Snow

Front Cover
Macmillan, Oct 10, 2001 - Nature - 208 pages
No more than a few thousand tigers survive in pockets of Asia, a continent they once roamed far and wide. The largest of them, the Siberian tiger, is today almost entirely confined to the little-populated Russian Far East, a region that may offer the species' best hope for survival. But the implosion of the Soviet Union intensified poaching and habitat depredation, prompting a group of Russian researchers and U.S. wildlife biologists led by Maurice Hornocker to join forces to stave off extinction.

Peter Matthiessen brings to the Siberian tiger the deep knowledge of and feeling for the natural world that have made classics of his previous books. Accompanying researchers into the field, he allows the reader to participate vicariously in the battle for the tiger's future. Along the way, he tells how the species evolved and evokes its crucial, often totemic role in human cultures and mythologies. He has made of the tiger's dilemma a drama-underscored by Hornocker's one-of-a-kind photographs-that conveys powerfully what a loss to our collective imagination the disappearance of these great cats would be.
 

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Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
6
Section 3
17
Section 4
39
Section 5
40
Section 6
105
Section 7
111
Section 8
127
Section 9
128
Section 10
131
Section 11
151
Section 12
155
Section 13
165
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About the author (2001)

Nature writer and novelist Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City on May 22, 1927. He graduated from Yale University in 1950. He worked as a commercial fisherman and the captain of a charter fishing boat and made several scientific expeditions to Alaska, Peru and New Guinea. He and Harold L. Humes founded the Paris Review, and Matthiessen was its first fiction editor. Matthiessen's nature books include "Wildlife in America," "The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness" and "Under the Mountain Wall." His fiction includes "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," which was made into a movie starring Tom Berenger and was nominated for the National Book Award. Matthiessen's other awards include the John Burroughs Medal and the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation Award.

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