Twelve times since 1973, an international set of racing yachts
has taken to the ocean for a Round the World Yacht Race (first sponsored by
Whitbread brewery and now called the Volvo Ocean Race, under its new sponsor).
It’s dangerous work, with crews pitted against each other, the weather, and the
implacable seas. Until 1989, ocean racing was a man’s game, with women
unwelcome even in the galley. Only five of the 200 crew members on boats in the
race before 1989 were women.
But in that year, everything changed, as shown in the
riveting new documentary written and directed by Alex Holmes detailing the
voyage of the Maiden (trailer). Using 30-year-old
footage it includes film of the trip, comments by other captains, and excepts
from upbeat interviews with the Maiden’s
captain, Tracy Edwards. Interviews with her today reveal how frightened she
was. For a very long time, she couldn’t get a sponsor for the expensive venture;
even running the race was costly, with a land crew to meet and help them at
every stop. A lot was riding on her boat’s success.
No one expected them to do well against the 22 other boats
in the race. Everyone knew “girls” couldn’t sail such a demanding course. The
local Portsmouth punters took bets on how far they’d get—out of the harbor,
then back? the Canary Islands? No one expected them to finish the race’s first
leg, across the Atlantic to Uruguay, much less the entire race. The dismissive yachting
journalists and rival captains reinterviewed today have vivid memories of how
Edwards scuttled their assumptions.
The Maiden won the
most grueling leg of the race, across the far south latitudes, icebergs and
all, to reach Australia, then the shortest, around to a stop in New Zealand,
which required precision boat-handling. It wasn’t just the physical challenge
of controlling a 58-foot boat in heavy seas. It was a mental and endurance
challenge as well, especially for Edwards, who served as skipper and navigator.
For every member of the crew then and now, this experience
was the adventure of a lifetime. An uplifting journey for viewers too. Says Adam
Graham in the Detroit News, Maiden “ tells a story whose tidal waves
were felt far beyond the deck of her ship.” And you stay dry.
By PA De Voe – If you want a total escape from Brexit or US
or European politics, PA De Voe’s second-in-series Ming Dynasty Mystery, No Way to Die, will take you back to
late 1300s China. As a devoted fan of the Judge Dee mysteries of Robert
van Gulik, set six hundred years earlier in the Tang Dynasty, I was
delighted to find De Voe’s well-crafted series.
The prose is deceptively simple. No lengthy descriptions,
just enough information to let you picture the scene—a style in keeping with
both the era in which the stories are set and the heavily verb-dependent
Chinese language.
Women’s doctor (and woman doctor) Xiang-hua is asked to
serve as coroner to determine whether the mangled body of a stranger found in
the village herbalist’s pig pen got there through foul play. Alas, the pig had
made a bit of a meal of the man before his body was removed. Numerous males of
the community are concerned the sight of the mangled corpse may be too much for
the young Xiang-hua. But she does not shrink from the task. Trained as a healer
by her grandmother, Xiang-hua is determined to fulfill her obligations
(striking a feminist note that resonates in the 21st century). It’s tough, but
she’s in possession of herself well enough to discover the dead man, muddy and
bloody, had been stabbed in the back.
The local officials want to know the victim’s identity and,
if possible, who stabbed him, before they have to report the crime to higher
authorities. If they fail to find out, it will likely to bring down the wrath
of the bureaucracy, never a pleasant outcome in ancient China, as punishments
were plentiful and harsh. This is a prime example of how De Voe uses
700-year-old realities to create situations that adhere to one of the basic
memes of modern crime stories: the ticking clock.
The investigation enables a fascinating trip back to a colorful and simpler time, and though the culture was so different, human emotions and motivations are the same across eons. De Voe’s training as an anthropologist and her advanced degree in Asian studies mean that what she writes carries an authority based on deep knowledge of that long-ago culture and society. I’ll be looking forward to more of her excellent tales!
The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey kicks off its 2019 season with a rollicking dramatic comedy adapted from the Alexander Dumas classic by popular playwright Ken Ludwig, which opened June 15 and runs through July 7.
As director, renowned fight choreographer Rick Sordelet makes good use of his experience in the swashbuckling swordplay the stage barely contains. Sitting in the front row, I was sure a rapier-wielding musketeer would end up in my lap!
In 1625 France, the handsome young d’Artagnan
(played by Cooper Jennings) and his sister Sabine (Courtney McGowan) leave their
home in Gascony for Paris in search of adventure. He wants to join the famous school
of musketeers, charged with defending King Louis XIII (Michael Stewart Allen)
and Queen Anne (Fiona Robberson). Sabine is bound for a convent school, but
disguised as d’Artagnan’s servant, gleefully finds herself embroiled in his
exploits.
In Paris, d’Artagnan stumbles into
the three most admired musketeers, each in turn—Athos (John Keabler), Porthos
(Paul Molnar), and Aramis (Alexander Sovronsky)–offending each of them. The
result is a schedule of three duels for that very night. Before d’Artagnan can
be skewered, they are set upon by the minions of the scheming Cardinal
Richelieu (Bruce Cromer) and his guardsman Rochefort (Jeffrey M. Bender). The
now four allies fight the Cardinal’s men bravely. Impressed with d’Artagnan’s
fighting skills, he’s won three important friends. An assignation d’Artagnan
has made with the queen’s lady-in-waiting Constance (Billie Wyatt) also turns
out rather well.
The plot proceeds mostly along the
story’s familiar lines, except that Ludwig has given a larger role to the
women. His creation Sabine is her brother’s equal in fencing and in enthusiasm
for combat. In several scenes, the women are active fighters, including Sabine,
the evil Milady (Anastasia Le Gendre), and the serving wench at an inn who uses
a short sword and a serving tray as shield.
With all of Ludwig’s trademark
humor and love of stage chaos, there’s not a dull moment, and the 20-member cast
delivers the action convincingly, with a heady mix of heroism, treachery,
narrow escapes, music, and laughter. Especially fun was the somewhat dim Louis
XIII. He may not be the brightest, but, boy, does he love being king! Jennings
is physically perfect for the unworldly d’Artagnan. He’s a young actor, yet
plays the role with perfect assurance. The “inseparable three” (Keabler,
Molnar, and Sovronsky) establish distinct and interesting personalities.
Special mention should be made of McGowan, who stepped in on short notice when
the original actor playing Sabine broke her foot in previews. She had only a
few days to prepare and performed flawlessly.
The adaptation, originally commissioned by the Bristol Old Vic in England was a tremendous hit when it premiered in 2006, a result of its judicious updating alongside its timeless evocation of loyalty and honor. “All for one and one for all!” Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online. Note that STNJ offers special ticket pricing of $30 for theatergoers under age 30!
Author Lynne Olson drew a standing-room-only crowd at the
Princeton Public Library this week to hear her discuss her latest book, a
biography of a mostly unheralded Frenchwoman, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade.
Fourcade ran a loose network of 3,000 spies within Vichy France during the Nazi
occupation, and Olson calls it the most influential organization spying on the Nazis
in the war.
Born in 1909 to wealthy parents and raised in Shanghai, she
married a military intelligence officer at age twenty, and ultimately had three
children. During the war, she sent the children to Switzerland for safety and
did not see them for years at a time. Sometime in there, Olson says, she had an
affair with pilot hero and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Le Petit Prince, et al.) She survived
the war and many harrowing experiences and died in Paris in 1989.
The French Resistance movement, uncoordinated and spotty though it was, came in three flavors. Two have received considerable attention in films. First, sabotage—blowing up train tracks and the like (the Sebastian Faulks novel and film Charlotte Graydepict this nicely). Then there were the heroic efforts to help downed British and American pilots escape. The third, less cinematic job of the Resistance was intelligence gathering. Where are the troops headed, the armaments stored, the ships docked? This is the kind of information the Allies badly needed and Fourcade’s huge network collected and passed on.
You’ll recall that de Gaulle was in London during the war,
but when Fourcade’s brother traveled there to offer the network’s services,
characteristically, he would not cooperate. But MI6 would, not realizing for
quite a while that the group’s leader, code name “Hedgehog,” was a woman. She
was arrested several times and escaped twice. After D-Day, she was again
captured, but that night she stripped down, held her dress between her teeth
and wriggled through the bars of her cell, put her dress back on, and walked
away.
She and one notable young woman who worked for her were able
to get the information they did from unsuspecting Germans because, for the most
part, no one took her seriously because she was a woman. She’s nearly forgotten
today, Olson believes, for the same reason. After the war, de Gaulle created an
organization to honor the war’s heroes—1032 of its 1038 members were men.
Olson’s conclusion is reinforced by the experience of another unheralded WWII spy, American Virginia Hall. One of the several new books (movies in the making!) about her is titled A Woman of No Importance.
Two supremely entertaining documentaries in theaters now on
the power of music and dedication of musicians. Yesterday, Aretha Franklin’s Amazing
Grace, which we had to wait almost a half-century to see on screen.
A Tuba to Cuba
Unbelievably, two movies in the space of two weeks have
featured a tuba (see review of A Woman at War), but coincidence has
struck gold. A Tuba to Cuba tells the
story of a two-week Cuban adventure by members of New Orleans’s Preservation
Hall Jazz Band who in 2015 traveled there for a series of concerts,
get-acquainted sessions, and impromptu events. The documentary was directed by
T.G. Herrington and Danny Clinch (trailer).
The band members of all ages find much musical commonality with
their Cuban brethren, which they trace back to African influence, and they
delight in their discoveries and in each other. Each member of the current band
on the trip has a chance to shine as both performer and person.
Leader of the goodwill expedition is Ben Jaffe, whose
parents, Allan and Sandra Jaffe, moved
to New Orleans in the early 1960s, loved the music, and feared it was being
lost. His father played the tuba, and started the Preservation Hall Jazz Band,
for which the entire nation owes him profound gratitude.
The scenes around Havana, as well as several other towns, show the expected 1960s American cars and colorful houses, and a gorgeous concert hall in their final stop. But above and beyond the physical surroundings, the people—especially some jazz-loving young Cuban musicians—are terrific. The trip inspired the later PHJB album So It Is.
When they’re good, thrillers set in interesting foreign
places are like a trip without the airport hassles. Both of these seemed like promising
journeys, and both had good points. If the premise intrigues you, go for it.
***Secrets of the
Dead
By Murray Bailey – This is the second of Murray Bailey’s crime thrillers to follow the adventures of Egypt archaeologist Alex MacLure, and it’s clear the author knows his subject.
Secrets of the Dead
begins, not in Egypt, but in Atlanta, Georgia, where a cache of bodies has been
found, eight in all. The victims were buried in a crawl space under The Church
of the Risen Christ. FBI agent Charlie Rebb and her annoying partner Peter
Zhang are immediately brought into the investigation because she’d worked a
previous serial killer case in which the eight victims were murdered in the
same manner as those under the church. They bear a mysterious mark loosely
linked to a local tattoo artist who appears to have fled the country.
Alex MacLure’s research is under way in the town established
by Pharoah Akhenaten and his beautiful wife, Nefertiti. Ancient secrets hide in
the artifacts of the period, and MacLure hopes to reveal them. A stranger claiming
special knowledge asks MacLure to meet him in Cairo, and MacLure follows a
rather obscure trail of breadcrumbs to find the mysterious man. When he enters
the apartment, he finds not an informant, but a dead body. Hard on his heels
are the police, and an uncomfortable time in an Egyptian jail ensues. Bailey’s
vivid description of jail conditions are enough to make you not risk even a
jaywalking ticket in Cairo.
Charlie Rebb is sent to Egypt to work with Cairo police, as
a body has been found there with similar markings as those under the church. Clearly
the two stories are becoming intertwined. Occasional sections are from the
point of view of the killer and his Master, unnecessary in my opinion, and not
very realistic.
Bailey intersperses Rebb’s and MacLure’s narratives with the
story of Yanhamu, an official from 1315 BCE who became the Pharoah’s Keeper of
Secrets. He was given the charge of finding one particular secret, that of
everlasting life.
Bailey’s writing moves the action along smoothly. His
authentic passion for the country’s long and complicated ancient history shines
through. It’s a strong contender for your summer beach bag, the kind of book
you don’t want to have to think about too much. That’s partly because Bailey
doesn’t give you much help. The map and schematic of the Great Pyramid are a
step in the right direction. A glossary, perhaps a timeline, would be equally
welcome.
***Pretense
By John Di Frances
– This is the first book of a trilogy about an international hunt
for a trio of assassins targeting European politicians. As a crime thriller,
the tradecraft of the assassins is detailed and persuasive, and the police
procedural elements also are good. It’s billed as a book that demonstrates
disenchantment with the European Union – the assassination targets are
big EU supporters – but it doesn’t really work as a political thriller, because
there’s very little politics in it. The assassins could just as well be
murdering top chefs or social media gurus.
The assassins are an Irish couple, handsome and strikingly
beautiful, wealthy, elegant, and socially adept (in a too-good-to-be-true way)
and a more rough-around-the-edges German man, who is an expert sniper. The
couple’s first target is Slovakia’s prime minister, killed by a car bomb outside
a Bratislava restaurant. The German accomplishes the second murder, that of the
Polish prime minister. It’s technically difficult, shooting from a distance of
640 meters into a packed stadium of excitable soccer fans.
The three escape to Berlin, several steps ahead of the multiple
security services now on their trail. The cat-and-mouse game is well done and
may carry you through some of the clunky writing. Technical information dumps
show Di Frances did his homework. Yet the weight or length of a rifle is
immaterial, of itself. Such information needs to be brought into the story. Has
the sniper had experience with a rifle of that type, is its length an advantage
or does it make it hard to conceal? Worst was a bullet-point list of 16
variables affecting the soccer stadium shot. Dude, this is fiction!
The plot pulls you forward nevertheless, and Di Frances has a great twist in store. Unfortunately, when you reach the end of Pretense, you’re not at the end of the story. To really understand what’s been going on, you’ll have to read book two and very probably book three. Not sure I’m ready for that.Link to Amazon.
Said Peter Goldberg in Slant Magazine, “Single-minded and direct in its execution, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s The Mustang is a hard look at the extremes of masculine guilt and healing” (trailer).
The main character, Roman Coleman (Matthias Schoenaerts) smiles only once, I think, in the whole film. For the most part, Coleman doesn’t interact with his fellow prisoners in a Nevada medium security prison. His attempts at a relationship with his daughter stall. We find out only deep in what his crime was, and the weight of it.
There’s a special prison program (in
place in Nevada and a number of Western prisons IRL) to train convicts to
work with wild mustangs, and tame them to the point they can be auctioned to
the border patrol, to ranchers, or for other uses. Putting a man like Coleman
in a corral with 1500 pounds of frantic horse seems more than a bit risky and
is. If only Coleman can learn relate to this one living thing—and vice-versa—perhaps
they both can be saved. As another prisoner/horse trainer says, “If you want to
control your horse, first you gotta control yourself.”
The parallels between the confinement and anger of this
mustang and this prisoner are obvious. Bruce Dern plays the elderly cowboy in
charge of the project, and he and the other prisoners are strong characters.
But it is Schoenaerts movie and, although the camera is on him throughout most
of it, he grows to fill the screen. Beautiful scenery too. (For one of the most
beautiful and moving films ever about men and horses, get ahold of last year’s The Rider.)Rotten
Tomatoes critics rating: 94%; audiences 74% .
Woman at War (2019)
This movie from Iceland director Benedikt Erlingsson has absurdist elements, real tension, and a lot of heart (trailer). Choral director Halla (played by Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, who also plays Halla’s twin sister Ása) is outraged at the prospect of booming unenvironmental heavy industry invading Iceland. She sets out to disrupt the development plans by sabotaging the electrical system, a bit at a time.
The authorities consider her protests eco-terrorism, and are determined to find whoever is carrying them out, with some nail-biting pursuits by helicopter and drone. To keep the story from becoming too anxiety-provoking, an absurd trio of musicians—piano, tuba, and drums—appears wherever she is, whether it’s on the heath or in her apartment. It’s the incongruous presence of the tuba that lets you know she’s ok.
She’s single and childless, until a four-year-old adoption
request is unexpectedly filled. A child is waiting for her in the Ukraine. From
this point, carrying out one last adventure before flying to retrieve her new daughter, Halla is
also accompanied by three Ukrainian women singers in full costume, as well. I
laughed out loud at this and some of the other antics. You will too.Rotten
Tomatoes critics rating: 97%; audiences 90%.
Beirut (2018)
Netflix provided this 2018 movie from director Brad
Anderson, written by Tony Gilroy, a controversial
political thriller set in Beirut, once the Paris of the Mideast, which has disintegrated
into civil war (trailer).
In 1972, John Hamm is an American diplomat and expert negotiator stationed in
Beirut who, after one tragic night returns to the States. He never wants to go
back. About a decade later, he does, when a friend is kidnapped, and he’s asked
by some highly untrustworthy U.S. agents to help in the rescue. Only Rosamund
Pike seems to have her head on straight. He finds a city in shambles, divided into fiercely
protected zones by competing militias. Finding his friend, much less saving
him, seems impossible. A solid B.Rotten
Tomatoes critics rating: 82%; audiences 55%.
Rembrandt (in
theaters 2019)
This documentary should be appended to last week’s review of
recent films on Caravaggio and Van
Gogh, a rare alignment of the planets that took me to three art films in a
week. This one describes the creation of an exhibition of Rembrandt’s late
works, jointly sponsored by Britain’s National Museum and the Rijksmuseum (trailer). Like those
other big-screen delights, the chance to look up close and unhurried at these
masterworks is the best part. There’s biographical information and commentary
from curators and others. The details of how the exhibition was physically put
together were fascinating too. One of my favorites among the works featured was
“An Old Woman Reading,” from 1655 (pictured). From Exhibition on Screen, you
can find a screening
near you.Rotten
Tomatoes critics rating: not rated yet.
By Kirby Williams – A book with Paris in the title two weeks
in a row? It’s enough to make you stock up on croissants. While the title of
this one echoes Dov Alfon’s contemporary crime thriller, A Long Night in Paris,
the similarity ends there.
This is Kirby Williams’s second thriller featuring New Orleans jazz prodigy Urby Brown, an expat living in Paris as the dark clouds of Naziism spread over Europe.
Author Williams, an expat himself, effectively conveys his love of the city where he has lived and worked for many decades in real life.
The book begins with Brown’s early years in New Orleans as a
white-skinned octoroon, son of a woman named Josephine Dubois and a white
Frenchman who skedaddled back to France after impregnating her. In 1895,
Josephine left her newborn in a Moses basket on the doorstep of Saint Vincent’s
Colored Waifs’ Home. She later pleaded with Father Gohegan, the priest in
charge of the Waifs’ Home, to contact the baby’s father who she claimed was a
Count. The priest refused, and Josephine committed suicide.
As a teenager, Brown played his clarinet at Madame Lala’s
Mahogany House (flaunting both Louisiana law and Father Gohegan’s rules), an
infamous bordello that brought together top jazz players. These connections
were renewed once he moved to Paris, joining the many musicians escaping U.S.
Jim Crow laws.
Along with his mentor and fellow clarinetist Stanley
Bontemps and his live-in girlfriend, Hannah Korngold, Brown lives in Paris in
relatively peace and prosperity into the 1930s. Hannah helps Brown run his
nightclub, but she is an American Jew whose future under the Nazis will be just
as precarious as his own.
Williams writes Brown’s first-person story with an emphasis
on what happens, not why or how. He doesn’t engage in lengthy descriptions of
people, places or events and will even slide past significant dramatic
opportunities. This spareness is both bothersome and energizing—bothersome
because you don’t always know why Urby Brown does what he does. At the same
time, it establishes a powerful narrative energy. The author apparently assumes
readers have a pretty solid mental picture of the fascists and the threat they
pose his characters and of Paris between the wars, and he relies on our imaginations
to fill out the picture.
Within that general atmosphere of risk are the very specific risks to Urby Brown. His father, to whom he bears a remarkable likeness, is indeed a count, a confidant of Marshal Philippe Pétain, and leader of the Oriflamme du Roi, a group of right-wing thugs who parade around like stormtroopers in advance of the real thing. Murder, blackmail, and spying are their stock-in-trade.
With the arrival of the Nazis, Urby and Hannah desperately attempt to escape back to the United States, but every indication is they’ve waited too long.
Written by Dov Alfon, translated by Daniella Zamir – Lots of action is packed into Dov Alfon’s debut novel, A Long Night in Paris, Israel’s bestselling book of 2016-2017, now available in English. It’s hard to believe so much can happen in little more than twenty-four hours!
The story begins one morning when a gregarious Israeli
software engineer disappears from the arrivals hall of Charles de Gaulle
Airport. An irrepressible flirt, he peels off from a group of colleagues to
link up with a beautiful blonde before the two seemingly disappear into thin
air.
Police Commissaire Jules Léger grudgingly organizes an
investigation, predictably hampered by too many cooks: airport security, the
Israeli police representative for Europe, a mysterious Israeli security colonel
named Zeev Abadi, and, most uncooperative of all, El Al security.
Abadi is a Tunisian Jew raised in the Paris suburbs. Not until midnight does he assume his official role as the new head of Israeli intelligence’s SIGINT unit. Temporarily in charge of the unit back in Tel Aviv, with minuscule bureaucratic power, is Lieutenant Oriana Talmor.
At the airport, Abadi uncovers footage showing the hapless
Israeli attacked by a pair of Chinese thugs and thrown into a sewer pit where
survival is impossible. Abadi soon realizes the attack was a case of mistaken
identity. He must figure out who was the actual intended victim and calls on Talmor
her team back in Israel for help. Separated by more than two thousand miles,
the two try to uncover the identity of the intended victim, his current
location, and the reasons he’s a murder target.
Although most of the short chapters are written from the
point of view of Abadi, Talmor, or Léger, some are from clueless higher-ups in
the Israeli and French governments, the various criminal operatives involved,
and the real quarry of the killers, a young man named Vladislav Yerminski. What
you mostly learn about him is that he’s checked into an expensive hotel with a
suitcase full of electronic gadgetry. (I forget how that bag got through Tel
Aviv’s airport security, if I ever knew.)
It’s a multinational cast of characters and you’re well
along before you realize what game Yerminski is playing and who’s behind the
mysterious gang of Chinese pursuing him. All the bureaucrats are busy trying to
spin the first victim’s undignified death in a way that masks the shortcomings
and errors in their own intelligence work. Even though I couldn’t quite believe
in the criminal mastermind whose Chinese assassins murdered the wrong man, I
totally believed that they work in a rogue system that does not tolerate error.
Alfon came to the writing of this book with the perfect
resume. He knows Paris, having been born and raised there. He is himself a
former intelligence officer in the Israeli Intelligence Corps’ Unit 8200, which
is responsible for signals intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption. His
political acumen was honed as a former cultural observer and editor in chief of
Israel’s major newspaper, Ha’aretz,
and he served as an editor for Israel’s largest publishing house. The
translation flows smoothly as well.
Western writers have exploited the tiger, says Aditi Natasha Kini in a Literary Hub essay, that goes on to illustrate the interplay of literature and wildlife mismanagement.
Authors have been mesmerized by the elusive tiger’s beauty, stunned by its cunning, and fascinated by its ferocity. Whereas a lion is social and, according to no less a wildlife expert than Gunther Gebel-Williams, tends to want to get along; tigers don’t care about you, not even about each other at times, as the recent London Zoo tragedy attests.
Alas, our fascination has been deadly for the tigers. “Do
you want to kill them because you are afraid—or because you covet their power?”
Kini asks.
Hard to believe in this era of heightened consciousness that
a New York Times South Asia bureau chief
“a few months ago,” Kini says, started writing admiringly about the hunt for a
tiger deemed menacing to Indian villages. Despite the editor’s “several
breathless articles,” certainly this writing did not generate the bloodlust of a
century ago, when an estimated 80,000 tigers were slaughtered between 1875 and
1925.
Kini draws a connection between this murderous spree and the
vilification of tigers in literature and popular culture. They came to be
portrayed as evil, monstrous, and murderous. Jungle creatures, “especially
sinewy marvels of evolution with massive jaws and impressive, though cryptic
abilities, became a vivid metaphor for the wild—and the colonial drive to
conquer it.”
The near-extermination of wild tigers becomes another
environmental depredation that naturally devolves from what Kini calls “the
narrative of human supremacy.” Now, one legacy of that narrative contributes to
global
warming, and the habitat loss likely to result will provide a further
threat to the species.
The World Wildlife Fund’s estimate that more tigers live in U.S. backyards than in the wild has received fairly wide publicity. Nevertheless, four states—Alabama, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin—have no laws at all about keeping dangerous wild animals as “pets,” including this week in an abandoned Houston garage. The reduced circumstances in which many of these animals live is the exact opposite of the iconic creatures of fiction. Unless, of course, you’re writing tragedy.
I highly recommend John Vaillant’s page-turner of a book about the Amur tigers of far eastern Russia, The Tiger. It’s non-fiction, and the action is heart-stopping. For the latest on this subject–Dane Huckelbridge’s February 2019 book, No Beast So Fierce.
