[This blog is posted under my name, but was written by my wife Lizby.  — Mark]

Because my husband works at Lemuria, my addiction to reading has a constant stream of books to feed it. Needless to say, I read quite a bit, and it’s always easy to choose my next indulgence, because my husband picks out books for me. He’s awfully good at it, but recently he outdid himself when he placed a book in my hand called Following Atticus. He bought it because the pictures on the cover and in the center fold were so darn cute, but as soon as I began to read, I realized what a gem he’d hit on.

Every once in a while, I find a book so compelling, that once I’ve read it I find myself unable to stop pestering friends to read it, too. This is one of those books. This true story is about a twenty pound miniature schnauzer and a middle-aged, overweight man and their attempt to hike all forty-eight of the deadly four-thousand foot white mountains in New Hampshire. In the wrong hands this could have been a sappy, cliched, cloyingly sweet story perfect for Disney to take on as their next animated feature. Fortunately, when Tom Ryan authored this book, he did it so masterfully that it transcends the simple plot and becomes so much more than a book about a little dog climbing big mountains.

What made the book so good was the love that Ryan clearly has for three things: literature, nature, and, of course, man’s best friend. As I read, I put a sticky note on every page with a quotation from other authors. By the time I was done there were so many bits of paper sticking up out of the top of the book that it looked like it had a mohawk. I got the sense that Ryan was so intimately familiar with the works of Kipling, Lewis, Frost, Emerson, Thoreau, and countless others, that quoting their words came as naturally as breathing. His descriptions of the mountains made me long to be back in my native New England, and see the those mountains again for myself. His account of his faithful companion captured the essence of “dog-ness” as only a real dog lover could.

In the Prologue of Following Atticus, Ryan says “I have come to judge a good story as one that makes me feel as if I’m losing a friend when I read the final page, close the book, and put it down for the last time”. This was one of those books for me. But here’s the best news – when I finished reading, I discovered that it wasn’t actually over. Little Atticus is still climbing mountains, and he has a blog with beautiful writing and photographs. So buy the book, check out the blog for pictures of all of Atticus’ adventures, and I hope you will be as enchanted by Following Atticus as I was.

There’s a particular danger when one works at a bookstore: the standard for which books are and are not worth reading becomes impossibly high, or at least, complicated. It goes something like this. For one to commit the time and energy to read a particular book, the book must:

1. Have won a major award, or
2. Be written by an author who has won major awards, or
3. Be featured in the New York Times Book Review (positively is better, but even a bad review is acceptable), or
4. Be mentioned by the publisher sales rep in a sales meeting, or
5. Be reviewed on NPR, or
6. Feature someone or something local, or
7. Be positively blurbed by at least one author we have hosted, or
8. Be compared to at least two books that we’ve enjoyed, or
9. etc.

These rules vary somewhat from person to person, but I think on some level we* all subconsciously reject books that we might otherwise enjoy, simply because they don’t fulfill all the requisite qualifications we’ve created for our own reading habits. This is to our detriment, I believe. Yes, books should be provocative, and challenging, and even difficult sometimes. But books are for our enjoyment as well, and I’ll admit that too often I’ve skipped what looked like a “fun read” because it didn’t seem weighty or important enough. Worse yet, I’ve realized that I’m much more prone to a slump in my reading when I exclude books I know I would enjoy.

This is all a convoluted introduction to the real topic here, which is: River Monsters. It’s a book by Jeremy Wade. The subtitle reads, “True Stories of the Ones That Didn’t Get Away.” The cover photo, as you can see, features Jeremy Wade holding a giant, toothy fish that he’s presumably caught. And honestly, I was pretty much sold by this point. But what sealed the deal was when I flipped to the color photo insert in the middle and found 16 pages of Jeremy Wade holding even more giant, toothy fishes. That’s really the essence of the book – story after story from Wade’s perspective, circling the globe looking for the biggest and weirdest freshwater fish. The author bio on the back flap reveals that Jeremy Wade was a copywriter and a newspaper reporter, which tells me that, at the very least, the prose won’t be distracting (and might just be pretty good).

I don’t need a book entitled “River Monsters” to be any more complicated than that. What else can I ask of this book? Not a thing.

*I switched to the plural “we” here because it was at this point that it struck me that maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m the only one who falls prey to this bad habit, and everybody else is really quite satisfied in their book-selecting ability. Perhaps I’m just projecting my own idiosyncracies on everyone else, but so be it – I’d rather think that this post finds an audience that understands what I’m talking about than believe that I’m the only one with this issue.

Whenever I see the first example of a current events title arrive in the store, I tend to assume that it’s not a very good book. This probably isn’t entirely fair — I’m sure that some very good books have been written very quickly, and I have read enough of them to know they exist. Thomas Sowell’s The Housing Boom and Bust, for example, was released in May of 2009, just months after the collapse, and I found it to be an extremely well-written and important book, as did John. The books that hit the market later may be more comprehensive, but it doesn’t mean the first book can’t be excellent in its own right.

With that in mind, I wasn’t immediately impressed when the first copy of 33 Men arrived in the store. Mentally I categorized it as a hastily-written attempt to cash in before the Chilean mining rescue fell completely off the national radar, but I’m a sucker for the glossy photo inserts in nonfiction books, so I flipped through it anyway. As I did, something on the front dustjacket flap caught my eye — the author, Jonathan Franklin, is an American journalist who has been living in Chile for 15 years as a Guardian correspondent, and was the only journalist given a “Rescue Team” pass. That pass gave Franklin full access to the rescue operation as well as access to the trapped miners through the video system the rescue team had set up.

What we have here isn’t a cobbled-together rehashing of the same news headlines and reports everyone read in August of 2010 — this is a story, written by the one person that had both the necessary access and ability, the one person perfectly placed to record and deliver that story to readers who want something beyond 24-hour news-cycle headlines and TV melodrama.

We’ve got a couple copies of 33 Men faced out on the shelf in the Adventure section — if you see them, don’t make the same mistake I nearly did — go ahead and pick one up, flip through it and read a little.

Survival and sustenance, high adventure in one of the most ecologically diverse regions in the world where both tropical and alpine conditions co-exist is the setting of this book. It is 1997 and the place is the very farthest Far East right above North Korea, to the east of China and bordered on the east by the Sea of Japan, a place called Primorye. The area is all Russian. This is where men and women escaped the ravages of boom towns that disintegrated almost as quickly as they were formed after perestroika (this word refers to Gorbachev’s political and economic changes to a freer market but not a stable one), men and women who would rather live off the land than try and amass paper money devalued to almost nothing overnight. The area was and is ripe in game, pine nuts, forests and the amur tiger, a god-like beast revered and feared. Unfortunately poachers from within and beyond the country had been killing this tiger to near extinction for its bones, organs, flesh and blood and its very spirit.

Drama abounds in this book and we meet unforgettable characters like Yuri Trush, a 6′ 2″ broad chested man whose prolific eyebrows frame his face. He’s tracking the 500-pound tiger who had once co-existed peacefully with men, often sharing fresh killed carcasses of other game with the men following in the tiger’s tracks. Yuri Trush is a man of all trades who is at home in the forbidding land among the animals who inhabit the crushing cold. Then there is the not-so-lucky Vladimir Markov whom we first meet as a corpse and only part of one who had been eaten by the amur tiger who appeared to deliberately and obsessively stalking Markov.

Liuty at Vladimir Kruglov's wildlife rehabilitation center-from The Tiger

Valliant often presents a current scene and goes back in immaculate prose to give us the background of the characters. He has an uncanny ability to draw his characters and the land with empathy no matter how depraved or unforgiving. The tension in the book comes from this literary and philosophical facility, offering few black and white answers to the old question of who is the hunter and who is the hunted and why. The only thing we know for sure is that living with tigers and poachers and lawless people in a land far removed from inspection is a life and death struggle for everyone. We can’t help but admire the tiger who can live in extremes from -50 degrees to 100 degrees F. The men who are sent to protect the tiger and other endangered species win our admiration, too, as they root out in sting operations among the poachers and desperadoes.

Throughout all of this is a fascinating history of Russia’s Far East explorers, the conservationists determined to prevent the annihilation of one of the earth’s most magnificent creations, while recounting Russian history in the time from the Bolshevik Revolution through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and including even the literary achievements of the men who wrote in and about this strange land.

The author has written for Outside, the New Yorker and National Geographic. He has an obvious talent for bringing individual adventure driven events in the Jon Krakauer mode into the warp and weave of a total cosmos (the Russian Far East) rendered in many different perspectives. If it weren’t for his amazing story and his ability to tell it, we might be overwhelmed with so much information. But the facts and the story flow and feed off each other (no puns intended here) as he welds animal and human lives together. His fine book begs the question: Do we anthropomorphize animals too much or too little?

-Pat