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Book Review: Tigers Forever

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Tigers Forever: Saving the World's Most Endangered Big Cat
by Steve Winter, with Sharon Guynup
National Geographic Books, 2013

A hundred years ago about 100,000 tigers lived in the wild. Today some 3,200 individuals remain. Drawing on a decade of tracking tigers throughout Asia, Winter's photographs and Guynup's prose bring readers close—sometimes uncomfortably close—to these creatures and those who fight their extinction. Tucked between beautiful images of the great cats playing and bathing, we find heartbreaking photographs of slain tigers, orphaned cubs and a distressed puppy kept as bait in a poacher's snare. Poachers, the authors explain, sell tiger parts on the black market, often for use in traditional Chinese medicine. Through its portrayal of tigers struggling for survival in a hostile world, Tigers Forever is both a call to action and an indictment of human greed.

Lee Billings is a science journalist specializing in astronomy, physics, planetary science, and spaceflight and is senior desk for physical science at Scientific American. He is author of a critically acclaimed book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, which in 2014 won a Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. In addition to his work for Scientific American, Billings’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Wired, New Scientist, Popular Science and many other publications. Billings joined Scientific American in 2014 and previously worked as a staff editor at SEED magazine. He holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota.

More by Lee Billings
Scientific American Magazine Vol 309 Issue 6This article was published with the title “Tigers Forever” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 309 No. 6 (), p. 80
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1213-80a

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