It would be great to learn about how this book was written.
Part story, part history, it feels like a masterclass on many different topics. You’ll learn about evolution, predators, Russia, and many other interesting topics.
Flow: 5/5
Actionability: 3/5
Mindset: 5/5
Some of My Highlights:
“…tigers can weight six hundred pounds; they have been hunting large prey, including humans, for two million years; and they have a memory.”
“The tiger will see you a hundred times before you see him once.”
“Lenin may have envisioned it, but Stalin mastered it: the ability to disorient and disconnect individuals and large populations, not just from the physical surroundings and core communities, but, ultimately, from themselves.”
“…Soviet Russia’s secrecy and paranoia are legendary to the point of caricature…”
“The Russian State, in other words, is masculine and paternalistic.”
“It is no coincidence that, in Russia, the divorce rate is one of the highest in the world, and single mothers (both literal and practical) are nearly as common as children.”
“Men carry their superiority inside; animals outside.” – Russian Proverb
“…in order to survive, they need to kill roughly one large animal each week, and they miss their mark between 30 and 90 percent of the time… As a result, injured or not, there is no rest for a tiger – no hibernation as there is for bears, no division of labor as with lions, and no migration to lush pastures as there is for many ungulates.”
“Fights between animals are rarely to the death because killing a powerful adversary is dangerous and takes an enormous amount of energy.”
“In Primorye, tigers attack and eat both black and brown bears on a daily regular basis; this is striking because, ordinarily, no animal in its right mind would take on a bear.”
“If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Objectively, these two creatures inhabit the same umgebung, but their individual umwelten give them radically different experiences of it.”
“I’ve read a tiger’s not dangerous, they say the tiger won’t attack. But one thing’s not clear to me. Has he read this, too? Does he know?”
“It is striking, too, that, unlike so many other species – cats, for example – we are the only branch of our family (Hominidae) who survived the journey.”
“In the West, a certain level of psychological awareness – and the language to go with it – is taken for granted now, but in Russia, with the exception of some in urban, educated circles, this is virtually nonexistent.”
“The brand-name Viagra is derived from vyaaghra, the Sanskrit word for tiger.”
“Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov.”
“To end a person’s life is one thing; to eradicate him from the face of the earth is another.”
“The hunt – like lovemaking – occurs in a timeless zone where all the external measures temporarily cease to apply. It is a ritual of concentration that determines life and death for all concerned.”
“The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first.”
“Over time, I realized that if you have accumulated more anger inside yourself than a tiger has in him, the tiger will be afraid of you. Really, quite literally so.” – Yevgeny Smirnov
“This wasn’t the fault of the hunters; it was because effective predators excel at engineering situations that skew the odds in their favor, and this is what the tiger had managed to do, even though he was injured and, most likely, in unfamiliar territory.”
“If you’re afraid of the wolf, stay out of the forest.” – Russian Proverb
“Odysseus and Ahab would have been impressed.”