Review: Christian Caryl Among the Amur Tigers
A new book on saving the tigers of Russia’s far east
I confess to a certain tiger addiction. My social media feeds are only too happy to service this need: tigers leaping, tigers stalking, tigers lazing, tigers swimming. There are lots of baby tigers, too, adorably practicing their roaring, cuddling with caregivers, or clambering over their brothers and sisters. But even these infant versions somehow manage to evoke the power, athleticism, and beauty of their species. I find it hard to take my eyes off them.
That we are able to see so much footage of tiger cubs reflects a sad reality: the majority of tigers alive on our planet today are captives. Most estimates seem to place the number of wild tigers at 4,500, which may well be an overcount. They live in slivers of habitat that have been laboriously protected, though the future of such places doesn’t seem entirely guaranteed, given the burgeoning human populations in India, Nepal, and other places where most tigers live.
But there is at least one place in the world where some progress has been made in increasing protections to tigers in recent decades: Russia. Jonathan Slaght has a gripping tale to share on this score. A few years ago he came out with a wonderful book about his work to conserve the endangered Blakiston’s Fish Owl, the world’s largest living species of owl, which is indigenous to the Russian Far East and Japan. Slaght conducted most of his research in Russia’s Maritime Province, bordering China and North Korea. It’s a region of dense forests and brutal winters, and these forbidding conditions lent a note of high adventure to his account of what it was like to study, trap, and monitor these amazing creatures. (One of the best ways of getting around was by riding snow mobiles on frozen rivers, an idea that still gives me the willies.)
His new book, Tigers Between Empires, revisits the same territory, fruit of the many years Slaght has spent in eastern Russia. Along the way he also translated a memoir by Vladimir Arsenyev, the Tsarist-era explorer who wrote several evocative accounts of his travels through Kamchatka and Khabarovsk in the early twentieth century. One of them was made into the 1970s film Dersu Uzala, a Soviet-Japanese co-production directed by none other than the Japanese meister Akira Kurosawa. It stands up wonderfully and offers a cinematic immersion in the environment that Slaght describes in his books.
Slaght tells the story of the joint Russian-American effort to study and protect the Amur Tiger (sometimes known as the “Siberian Tiger”). The collaboration started around the time the Soviet Union broke up, initially involving a small number of Americans who offered their experience and resources to their Russian counterparts.
Slaght’s narrative, which is after all aimed at an English-speaking audience, leans heavily on the Americans travelers. One of his heroes is Dale Miquelle, a wildlife biologist who arrived in 1992 and ended up staying until 2022. He came in the immediate wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, a moment that hit the Russian Far East—which had enjoyed little development under Soviet power—especially hard. The book documents the many obstacles—from language barriers to the decline of the local economy—that complicated the work. But there are also many touching examples of the partnership that soon developed among quite different people who shared a common mission of protecting tigers. The Americans tend to be earnest and even-keeled; the Russians include eccentrics like Dimitriy Pikunov, a leading figure in the world of Soviet tiger research, a man filled with “so much passion, stubbornness, and opinion that he periodically vented like a volcano, bellowing unpredictably in joy or rage.” Slaght tells us that Pikunov
had once spent weeks tracking a single male tiger, following the animal in the snow, himself eating only the scavenged remains from the carcasses of deer and boar that the tiger had left behind.
Pikunov is not the only Russian character who looms large in the book; happily Slaght gives plenty of space to the Russians who made this work possible. One problem the conservationists needed to solve early on was figuring out the best way to trap the tigers so that they could be fitted with tracking devices. Slaght describes a heart-stopping incident when Miquelle and nature reserve ranger Viktor Voronin caught a brown bear in their snare by mistake. They anesthetized the bear so they could free him, but the drug wore off too quickly, and the enraged beast charged the two men, tragically forcing the Russian to shoot it at the last moment. The researchers survived the attack only because Viktor, deeply experienced in the ways of his wild neighbors, had set up a fallback position that gave them time to react.
But this risky work also offered unique benefits. Who, after all, can say that they’ve had the chance to see the world’s largest cat in the wild? In the course of his thirty years Miquelle would encounter many tigers in traps and captivity—but the thrill of surprising one the big cats at large in the forest, on those rare occasions when it happened, was indelible. Early in his stint, Miquelle and a colleague, a leading tiger biologist named Igor Nikolayev, are following tiger tracks in the snow when they come across an imprint of the animal’s body at the edge of a river. They eventually realize that the cat has been feeding off a recent kill. Suddenly the Russian freezes in place. “Tigr,” he whispers. The American follows his gaze and finds himself looking into the eyes of a full-grown tiger thirty yards away. “People can live their entire lives in tiger country and never see one; those who do, remember,” writes Jonathan Slaght. “These animals evoke awe, respect, fear—anything but apathy.” Miquelle tells Slaght later that he’s seen a wide range of responses to humans from animals in the wild
But Dale saw none of that in this tiger: no visible panic, no anger, not really even any curiosity. And at the same time nothing gentle or kind. He was met by a blank gaze of cold steel.
Slaght’s riveting account renders this remote experience with exhilarating immediacy. (A tiger’s roar, he reports, is “a sound that moved through [one’s] body to fill the morning air like an avalanche scraping through a valley.”) Above all, he is able to explain how the combined efforts of these devoted biologists, nature bureaucrats, and forest rangers managed to bring Amur Tigers back from the brink to a wild population of nearly four hundred today—despite continuing habitat loss, poaching, and the spread of diseases like distemper. Species loss is an urgent threat to our natural systems, but it’s hard to write about it in a way that doesn’t descend into dreary sanctimony. Slaght not only has the skills of an intrepid wildlife adventurer, but also necessary gifts of description and advocacy to make it real.
Now if we could only figure out how to do the same for non-charismatic species like sharks, bats, or newts. We need them just as much, but they’re a much harder sell. Perhaps Slaght can find a way to work his magic on one of them in his next book.
Note to Readers: We will be taking a little break next Wednesday, and will return with an announcement and profile of our Winter Partner Bookseller on Sunday, December 30!
Christian Caryl is the author of Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century. He has worked as an Opinions editor at The Washington Post, a foreign correspondent for Newsweek, and an editor and columnist at Foreign Policy. He has written for Book Post on Colin Thubron, Jósef Czapski, Edward Gorey, and a dystopian novel on North Korean armageddon, among other subjects.
Join the Book Post Reader’s Circle to support our work and receive other benefits!
Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as commentary on the life of books and ideas by editor Ann Kjellberg. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Your subscription helps to support our work and brings you straight-to-you book posts by: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Jamaica Kincaid, Lawrence Jackson, John Banville, James Fallows, Marina Warner, Álvaro Enrigue, Nicholson Baker, Kim Ghattis, Michael Robbins, more.
The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, is Book Post’s Fall 2025 bookselling partner! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. Read our portrait of the work of the Berry Center here and support their work developing cultural programming for rural readers and encouraging the preservation of local knowledge and pride of place in agrarian communities. The Berry Center is among a group of innovative bookstores that pair bookselling with nonprofit work building readership. Does your local bookseller have a nonprofit arm? Please support their work.
We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore (in person or online) during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.
Follow us: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Notes, Bluesky, Threads @bookpostusa