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For millennia, lions, tigers, and their man-eating kin have haunted our jungles and nightmares, but soon alpha predators may vanish from the wild. Searching for these beasts and the people who still live alongside them, David Quammen visits and revisits four of their last refuges: India's Gir forest, home of the Asiatic lion; an Australian Aboriginal community that venerates crocodiles as ancestors; the Russian Far East and its tigers; and Romania, where shepherds coexist uneasily with brown bears. As he journeys into their habitats and confronts them where they live, Quammen reflects on the enduring significance of these predators to us and imagines a future without them.
David Quammen is a recipient of the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the author of five acclaimed natural history titles. His book, The Song of the Dodo, won the BP Natural World Book Prize in 1996. He lives in Montana.
"Erudite, witty, and utterly fascinating [...] sets a new standard in nature writing."
– T. Coraghessan Boyle
"Rich detail and vivid anecdotes of adventure [...] A treasure trove of exotic fact and hard thinking."
– The New York Times Book Review, front page
