Books by John Vaillant

“This book comes out of that fine North American tradition of nonfiction writing—a deeply researched and meticulously told account of a real event. It’s about a fire that happened up in the subarctic region of Canada, which is, by definition, very remote. It’s a very hard place to earn a living and it tells you a lot about human beings that tens of thousands of people have moved up there to work in the tar sands industry. This is a part of the oil industry that should be marginal because it’s very difficult to get the oil out. You have to expend huge amounts of electricity and natural gas to lift the sands and then to melt and render out the oil…Fire Weather tells the story of what happens when everything goes wrong and the unthinkable happens…this fire in 2016 went completely out of control. There are various reasons for that, but it points to a bigger issue around changes in the climate. The author gives you a very vivid account of that extraordinary event, which affected 90,000. It destroyed much of this place, Fort McMurray, and made a lot of people homeless. 2,400 structures were destroyed and 1,000 more were damaged.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

Frederick Studemann, Journalist

“It’s about Siberian tigers, the largest predator on earth. They can weigh 600lbs. Their numbers are greatly reduced, they are living in a reserve near the Chinese border. This book talks about how the very impoverished people living in these woods are negatively impacting on these tigers, quite specifically by shooting them. They sell them to the Chinese across the border who pay a huge amount of money to use them in folk remedies. Apparently the invention of Viagra has helped preserve the rhinoceros. Viagra works and powdered rhinoceros horn does not, so there’s less need for it. Boiled tigers’ bones and whiskers and whatnot in the folk remedies really don’t do anything for anybody. We are eliminating this magnificent animal that will soon be extinct. For one impoverished hunter, one tiger could get him a Toyota pick-up truck. He shoots a tiger. But this tiger has been shot several times, so this time the tiger objects, and all that was left of the hunter was two chewed up boots with the stumps of two feet in them. Sometimes nature strikes back, and in this book you really do root for the animal.” Read more...

The best books on Man and Nature

TC Boyle, Novelist