2. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

By John Vaillant

It’s surprising this book hasn’t been made into a Hollywood movie yet.  This thrilling true story features three main characters: Vladimir Markov, the poacher; Yuri Trush, the lead tracker; and the titular predator with a vendetta.  It’s also part natural history and part Russian history.  The author goes into detail about the “bleak post-perestroika Russian economy, creating a firm sense of place, but also sapping some of the narrative momentum”.

Vaillant skillfully recreates the events of December 1997 when a rogue tiger besieged a remote logging village in Russia’s Far Eastern Primorsky Krai, where most of the world's Amur tigers live.  Amur is a more accurate term for the Siberian tiger that inhabits that region. 

It all began when a local hard-up poacher, Vladimir Markov, shot and wounded a male tiger, then stole part of his kill, breaking a kind of unspoken pact between man and tiger since these apex predators generally avoid humans.  

“The injured tiger hunted Markov down in a way that appears to be chillingly premeditated. The tiger staked out Markov's cabin, systematically destroyed anything that had Markov's scent on it, and then waited by the front door for Markov to come home.”  

Based on the evidence later found at the scene, the tiger had waited 12 to 48 hours for his target to return, in which the tiger killed Markov, dragged him into a bush and ate him.   

Enter Yuri Trush, head of an anti-poaching unit known as Inspection Tiger,an organization created by the Russian government to combat the black-markettrafficking of tigers and tiger parts.  Physically imposing and a skilled fighter, Trush was a larger-than-life figure, and a"real warrior."

The rest of the book is mostly a cat and mouse game, but who is the cat and who is the mouse?

A compelling read from start to finish.  I would like to read more books by Vaillant - I hear The Golden Spruce is another good one.

1. The Emotional Life of the Toddler

By Alicia F. Lieberman

Good god, could it have been more than six months since I've read anything?  I guess parenthood has truly taken over my life.  What better way to start the year off with a parenting book!

When my firstborn was still wee and fresh, I ordered this paperback brand new from a certain online retail giant because I kept hearing about The Terrible Two’s and if that phase was somehow avoided, there was always The Terrible Three’s.  I can’t remember why I wanted this particular book – probably because the title appealed to me.  Knowing that every child-parent relationship is unique, I didn’t exactly want a practical how-to about wrangling toddlers, but something more akin to helping me understand my soon-to-be toddler better.

I really liked the anecdotal structure that drew from firsthand accounts from parents, because really, I just wanted to read about other experiences.  Also helpful was how it explained the most common personality traits - I think this was how I learned that my little one may have a more “slow to warm” temperament, especially with new people and situations.  I’m glad I read it as it did help me appreciate and enjoy the emphemeral phase of my child’s toddlerhood.

Now that I can look back in time, my kid never did go through any of the Terrible Toddler stages.  In general, she was very sweet-natured with only infrequent, short-lived tantrums that even resulted in fainting spells. We weren't unscathed, however, as the kid made up for it during The F*ckin' Fours!

If I didn't have seven years of books to input, I would have written something very much like this review, which I will copy since I realize not everything is permanent on the internet.

By Deborah Weatherston:

While reading Alicia Lieberman’s updated edition of “The Emotional Life of the Toddler,” I fell in love with toddlers all over again! Dr. Lieberman captures the wonder and complexity of emotional development in the early years, firmly addressing the safety and security of early development within the parent-child relationship.  She gives voice to the rich and deeply felt emotional world of very young children, helping parents appreciate the dynamics of growth and offering practical examples to guide parents through this crucial stage of development.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Lieberman places her observations about very young children and their caregiving parents squarely in the framework of attachment, in which parent and child negotiate a balance between the safety of closeness and the excitement of exploration and discovery.

In this sense, childhood is an early laboratory for the challenges and dilemmas of adult life.  Perhaps more dramatically than any other age, this period brings us face to face with two powerful yet contradictory impulses:  the longing to feel safe in the protective sphere of intimate relationships and the exhilarating thrust of carefree, unrestricted, uninhibited exploration, where one can soar free without looking back at those who are left behind.

However, as Dr. Lieberman describes in detail, the negotiation in toddlerhood is not without challenge. Throughout, Dr. Lieberman is sensitive to the toddler’s needs, as well as to the parent’s experience, in achieving that balance. She illustrates her thoughts about obstacles to partnership with many vignettes, bringing to life reflections about temperament and the question of “the fit” (whether the toddler is described as a high-activity or slow-to-warm up child) and its meaning or impact on the developing relationship.

Dr. Lieberman tackles with great sensitivity issues to understand: separation anxiety, nighttime difficulties, eating difficulties, sibling rivalry. She is careful to offer practical suggestions to encourage parental awareness and response that is likely to reduce the difficulty and lead to greater emotional security. She attends to marital discord and the disruption of divorce, careful to give voice to the toddler’s experience while supporting a parent’s capacity to provide a stable base in the midst of difficulties. Her chapter about toddlers in childcare offers support to the whole family in making the transition to care, “saying good-bye”, “saying hello,” and identifying the social realities of care for everyone.

I ended the book with a much greater respect for the power of the early attachment relationship and the toddler’s astonishing capacity to master staying close, while letting go.

Dr. Lieberman concludes with wise words:

Toddlers, like adolescents, need to forge an identify that integrates a solid sense of personal initiative with a reliable feeling of communal belonging. Parents are faced in both periods with the task of deciding when to respect aloneness, when to offer companionship, and when to exercise firm authority.

When parents’ choice is responsive to the child’s needs, the negativism of toddlers becomes the self-assured assertiveness of the preschool years, just as the emotional storms of adolescence resolve themselves in the self-worth of young adulthood.  P. 306

This should be required reading for each one of us who has a toddler to marvel about in our own families or in those with whom we work.

Year End Blurb

11 books for 2013.  Not even half the amount I read the previous year.  2011 remains my best year.  Autumn 2012 was when I become a parent.  Notice zero books read in October, November and December.  I blame new parenthood.

11. Are You My Mother?

By Alison Bechdel

This is the sequel and companion piece to Fun Home, which I was quite impressed by.  Are You My Mother? explores the author’s difficult relationship with her mother, who was no less interesting than her father.  Although her mother was not burdened with the ‘dark secret’ of closeted homosexuality, she was burdened with depression and maternal ambivalence.

Fun Home was more like a graphic memoir while AYMM was more like a therapy memoir, probably because Bechdel’s mother read many books about psychoanalysis and underwent years of therapy.  As a result, AYMM lacked the narrative cohesion and tighter structure of Fun Home, often meandering into self-indulgent tangents and psycho-babble.   

One example was how young Alison and her brothers used to compete for goodnight cuddles and kisses from their mom, and that all abruptly stopped one night when she was seven years old with only a “you’re too old” as an explanation. There is one sentence that simply said there was not enough of her mother to go around.  As a reader, I felt I had to infer what that might have meant to Bechdel as a child and how that shaped her personality as a grown up.  Also she doesn’t even explore what that could have meant for her brothers.  In fact, there were times I forgot she even had brothers, so I’m left with a very narcissistic point of view.

I get the feeling that a child’s memories of a distant parent can be incomplete; usually all that is left are unresolved feelings of hurt and loss.  I think this is why Bechdel replaced these gaps with digressions from Woolf or psychoanalytic quotes, which I suppose was better than supplementing missing memories with false ones. 

Our friend was certainly not impressed with AYMM when he passed on his copy to Olman and I and told us we can keep it.  Even Olman neglected to review it in his blog.

Yet despite all the flaws, I still got a lot out of this book.  I'm very interested in maternal ambivalence and how it manifests in a woman’s relationship with her children, especially during the post-WW2 era when many women questioned their traditional roles and purpose in society. Even today, exploring the negative side of motherhood is still considered an uncomfortable subject, even though it is no longer a social taboo.  I admire Bechdel’s courage in sharing her intimate reflections on her upbringing, and for putting her memories, thoughts, feelings and obsessions on paper in such a uniquely beautiful way.

10. The Historian

By Elizabeth Kostova 

My god was this book ever a chore to read.  I think every reader has been burdened with a book that requires conscious plodding.  Trying to get through a few pages while in between more engaging books.  

My mistake was that I kept expecting it would get more interesting, or that the pace would pick up...  If I had known that The Historian would be such an arduous slog from start to end, I would have stopped sooner.  Much, much sooner.

Although the author is American (née Johnson, Kostova is her married name), the writing really seemed like it was translated awkwardly from another language to English.  It was also rather dull and long-winded; burdened with overly expository passages written in epistolary form as the novel is comprised of letters from a historian to his daughter. 

To this day (seven years later), I have no recollection of what I had read.  Something about a never-ending search for Dracula, which seemed to just drag on and on in more ways than one.  

Having read some Goodreads reviews, I was certainly not the only survivor reader with such feelings.  It’s disappointing really, as The Historian was heavily promoted and reviewed -  I remember being intrigued by its seemingly unique hybridization of genres: gothic, adventure, detective, travelogue, postmodern historical, epistolary epic and historical thriller.  I can tell you now that even though The Historian had all these elements, it was far from thrilling or adventurous.  There might have been some sparse action scattered here and there amongst the long-winded prose, and it was certainly epic in its tedium.  When it comes down to it, I don’t think I have ever come across a book that held so much promise yet delivered so much nothing. 

Thank the Devil I only spent a couple of bucks on this tome (another Chainon find), but I cannot get back the lost hours I spent on something on words that are now like tears in rain.