Synopses & Reviews
"Steven Church stalks the entire genre of nature writing, rips it down to the raw bone, then reassembles the parts into something totally new and utterly compelling." — Justin Hocking, author of The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld
On September 21, 2012, twenty-five-year-old David Villalobos purchased a pass for the Bronx Zoo and a ticket for a ride on the Bengali Express Monorail. Biding his time, he waited until the monorail was just near the enclosure of a four-hundred-pound Siberian tiger named Bashuta before leaping into it. They spent ten long minutes together in the tiger’s cage before nature took its course, with one exception: the tiger did not kill him. David’s only response: "It’s a spiritual thing. I wanted to be at one with the tiger."
One with the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals uses David’s story, and other moments of violent encounters between humans and predators, to explore the line between human and animal. Exposing what the author defines as the "shared liminal space between peace and violence," Church posits that the animal is always encroaching on the civilization — and those seeking its wildness are in fact searching for an ecstatic moment that can define what it means to be human. Using examples from Timothy Treadwell to Mike Tyson, and such television icons as Grizzly Adams and the Incredible Hulk, Church shows how this ecstasy can seep its way into the less natural world of popular culture, proving time and again that each of us can be our own worst predator.
Review
"From the iron of a zoo cage’s bars to the expanse of our nation’s national parks, One With the Tiger examines the spaces in which humans contain animals, and how those acts of containment often fail. Church is a classically essayistic observer — curious, haunted, self-deprecating — and it’s through this lens that we’re confronted with stories of infamous animal attacks, pop culture icons, and the author’s own longing to inch forward as a bear approaches. In this marvelous collection, Church seems to write his consciousness directly onto the page, and in it we can see an entire civilization’s clumsy, sometimes desperate, attempts to understand our relationship to the wild." Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This
Review
"Church combines the thoughtfulness of Rebecca Solnit with the sharpness of Chuck Klosterman, producing a collection of essays that is as insightful as it is entertaining." Booklist
Review
"Church has written a funny, smart, and terrifying book that explores the invisible boundaries between human and animal. This sensitive and thoughtful writer allows the reader to hear the siren call of the wild and step deep into the existential anxiety of what it means to be human." Jennifer Percy, author of Demon Camp
Review
"Church does well in connecting the human fascination with apex predator behavior and its potential relation to our own animal instincts…[a] captivating study." Library Journal
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"[An] insightful exploration of human infatuation with nonhuman animals" Publishers Weekly
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"A powerfully written attention-grabber." Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Steven Church is the author of The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record, Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents, The Day After 'The Day After': My Atomic Angst, and most recently, Ultrasonic, which was featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, and Tin House, among others. His essays have been published and anthologized widely, including in the Best American Essays and most recently in After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays. He teaches in the MFA program at Fresno State, where he is the Hallowell Professor of Creative Writing.
Steven Church on PowellsBooks.Blog
A couple of years ago, as I was working on the initial drafts of the manuscript that would eventually become my new book,
One With the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals, I was invited to read at a university, something I’ve done many times. I had no idea at the time, though, that this reading and the audience’s reaction...
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