Book Description

The tiger has captured the imagination of human beings from the beginning of recorded history. It has been feared, worshipped, admired, hunted, studied, photographed, written about, immortalized in art and poetry, and has enthralled king and commoner alike. Tiger Fire celebrates this magnificent predator by bringing together the very best non-fiction writing, photography and art on the Indian tiger from the first written description of a real-life encounter with the animal by the Mughal Emperor Babur in the sixteenth century to photographs and studies of the last of the species surviving in the wild today. Conceived and edited by the world's foremost authority on the Indian tiger, Valmik Thapar (who has also contributed many pieces and photographs to this volume), the book's contributors are drawn from an array of renowned naturalists, writers, photographers, and tiger enthusiasts down the centuries including Babur, Akbar, François Bernier, Thomas Roe, R.G. Burton, Walter Campbell, Thomas Williamson, F.W. Champion, Kesri Singh, Jim Corbett, Hugh Allen, Richard Perry, Arjan Singh, George Schaller, Kenneth Anderson, M. Krishnan, Peter Jackson, Fateh Singh Rathore, Kim Sullivan, Tejbir Singh, Jaisal and Anjali Singh, Aditya 'Dicky' Singh, K. Ullas Karanth, Dharmendra Khandal, and Dhritiman Mukherjee. Culled from over a million words (both published and unpublished) on the animal, and several thousand photographs, the accounts and pictures assembled in this book show us the tiger in extraordinary and compelling detail.