No more than a few thousand tigers now survive in pockets of Asia, a continent they once roamed far and wide. The largest of them, the Siberian tiger, is today almost entirely confined to the little-populated Russian Far East, a region that may offer the species' best hope for survival.

Peter Matthiessen brings to the Siberian tiger the deep knowledge of and feeling for the natural world that have made classics of his previous books. He has made of the tiger's dilemma not a manifesto but a drama -- underscored by Maurice Hornocker's one-of-a-kind photographs -- that conveys powerfully what a loss to our collective imagination the extinction of these great cats would be.