With their unmistakable stripes, tigers are hard to miss! They are also fearsome predators. Learn how tigers hunt, why they are so skilled at catching prey, and how they thrive in their habitat.

A National Geographic photographer embarks on a one-man mission to address the plight of the tiger before it's too late.

It's December 1997 and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russia's Far East. The tiger isn't just killing people, it's annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. To their horrified astonishment it emerges that the attacks are not random: the tiger is engaged in a vendetta. Injured and starving, it must be found before it strikes again, and the story becomes a battle for survival between the two main characters: Yuri Trush, the lead tracker, and the tiger itself. As John Vaillant vividly recreates the extraordinary events of that winter, he also gives us an unforgettable portrait of a spectacularly beautiful region where plants and animals exist that are found nowhere else on earth, and where the once great Siberian Tiger - the largest of its species, which can weigh over 600 lbs at more than 10 feet long - ranges daily over vast territories of forest and mountain, its numbers diminished to a fraction of what they once were. We meet the native tribes who for centuries have worshipped and lived alongside tigers - even sharing their kills with them - in a natural balance. We witness the first arrival of settlers, soldiers and hunters in the tiger's territory in the 19th century and 20th century, many fleeing Stalinism. And we come to know the Russians of today - such as the poacher Vladimir Markov - who, crushed by poverty, have turned to poaching for the corrupt, high-paying Chinese markets. Throughout we encounter surprising theories of how humans and tigers may have evolved to coexist, how we may have developed as scavengers rather than hunters and how early Homo sapiens may have once fit seamlessly into the tiger's ecosystem. Above all, we come to understand the endangered Siberian tiger, a highly intelligent super-predator, and the grave threat it faces as logging and poaching reduce its habitat and numbers - and force it to turn at bay. Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger is a gripping tale of man and nature in collision, that leads inexorably to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the Siberian forest.

'An IAS officer's must-read anecdotal account of how official karma prevails over personal dharma.' - Y.V. Reddy, former RBI governor India is famous for Jim Corbett's tales of hunting man-eaters in the Kumaon region. Equally fascinating are the tiger hunting tales that senior bureaucrats recount, of achievements real and imagined, when they look back on their career. K. Pradeep Chandra has many stories of this kind to tell, and for those interested in the IAS, they are of immense use. From a career that spanned thirty-four years, there are examples of fighting corruption, ignorance and casteism. There are also problems that defy solution - an old woman whose insistence on division of land results in a tragedy, an attempt to find an acceptable solution to ownership of shifting lanka (island) lands in Rajahmundry. And there is a taut chapter on a prolonged negotiation with naxalites when lives of fellow officers are at stake; a lesson that a course book may not offer. Pradeep Chandra also shares about the challenges of working with powerful politicians like N.T. Rama Rao, Chandrababu Naidu and K. Chandrasekhar Rao. At the beginning of his career, his father had told him, 'If you can make a concrete difference in the lives of 100 poor people, you would have some meaning in your life.' As the author discovered, this was perhaps the hardest thing to accomplish, and what gave his work the truest value.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. SEMI-FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR ART OF THE ESSAY. One of Amazon, Buzzfeed, ELLE, Electric Literature and Pop Sugar's Best Books of 2018. Named one of the Best Books of October and Fall by Amazon, Buzzfeed, TIME, Vulture, The Millions and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. “Hilarious, nimble, and thoroughly illuminating.” —Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad A globe-spanning, ambitious book of essays from one of the most enthralling storytellers in narrative nonfiction In his highly anticipated debut essay collection, Impossible Owls, Brian Phillips demonstrates why he’s one of the most iconoclastic journalists of the digital age, beloved for his ambitious, off-kilter, meticulously reported essays that read like novels. The eight essays assembled here—five from Phillips’s Grantland and MTV days, and three new pieces—go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world’s most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular oddities (though they do that, too). Researched for months and even years on end, they explore the interconnectedness of the globalized world, the consequences of history, the power of myth, and the ways people attempt to find meaning. He searches for tigers in India, and uncovers a multigenerational mystery involving an oil tycoon and his niece turned stepdaughter turned wife in the Oklahoma town where he grew up. Through each adventure, Phillips’s remarkable voice becomes a character itself—full of verve, rich with offhanded humor, and revealing unexpected vulnerability. Dogged, self-aware, and radiating a contagious enthusiasm for his subjects, Phillips is an exhilarating guide to the confusion and wonder of the world today. If John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead was the last great collection of New Journalism from the print era, Impossible Owls is the first of the digital age.