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One With the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals
On September 21, 2012, twenty-five year old David Villalobos purchased a pass for the Bronx Zoo and a ticket for a ride on the Bengali Express Monorail. Biding his time, he waited until the monorail was just near the enclosure of a four hundred pound Siberian tiger named Bashuta before leaping into it. They spent ten long minutes together in the tiger’s cage before nature took its course, with one exception: The tiger did not kill him. David’s only response: “It’s a spiritual thing. I wanted to be at one with the tiger.”
One with The Tiger: On Savagery and Intimacy uses David’s story, and other moments of violent encounters between humans and predators, to explore the line between human and animal. Exposing what the author defines as the “shared liminal space between peace and violence,” Church posits that the animal is always encroaching on the civilization —and those seeking its wildness are in fact searching for an ecstatic moment that can define what it means to be human. Using examples from Timothy Treadwell to Mike Tyson, or such television icons as Grizzly Adams and The Incredible Hulk, Church shows how this ecstasy can seep its way into the less natural world of popular culture, proving time and again that each of us can be our own worst predator.
One with The Tiger: On Savagery and Intimacy uses David’s story, and other moments of violent encounters between humans and predators, to explore the line between human and animal. Exposing what the author defines as the “shared liminal space between peace and violence,” Church posits that the animal is always encroaching on the civilization —and those seeking its wildness are in fact searching for an ecstatic moment that can define what it means to be human. Using examples from Timothy Treadwell to Mike Tyson, or such television icons as Grizzly Adams and The Incredible Hulk, Church shows how this ecstasy can seep its way into the less natural world of popular culture, proving time and again that each of us can be our own worst predator.
290 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 15, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 16, 2017
If you've ever wondered, even fleetingly, what it must be like to be in physical contact, up close and personal, with a wild animal then this book is worth your time. The author examines that urge by looking deeply at the lives of some who entered into that primal place and did not survive and some who did. He examines his own urge to be in close connection with beasts...grizzlies, tigers, lions and beyond that to be that part of the natural world that is without past or present.
December 3, 2016
Tigers and lions and bears, oh my. And Mike Tyson. And that one time the author got really mad at a guy and held him up by his neck. National parks, zoos, boxing rings. The Beast Master and the Jungle Book.
This is a collection of related essays/autobiographical stream of consciousness musings, and I'm not quite sure I "got it" or could relate to anything beside the fact that I understand and adore the feeling you get when you're hanging out in the wild with grizzly bears and mountain lions. I didn't enjoy the format or Church's language. I hate saying it, since it's cliche, but this book just wasn't for me (although I learned quite a few interesting facts, like about the extremely disturbing federal mass extermination of Canadian geese and goose eggs in NYC after the Sully Sullenberger Hudson landing).
The last sentence in the book sums it up perfectly: "I supposed I want to give a heart to the barbarian, and to normalize the need to get intimately close to apex predators, so close even that you become one with the tiger".
This is a collection of related essays/autobiographical stream of consciousness musings, and I'm not quite sure I "got it" or could relate to anything beside the fact that I understand and adore the feeling you get when you're hanging out in the wild with grizzly bears and mountain lions. I didn't enjoy the format or Church's language. I hate saying it, since it's cliche, but this book just wasn't for me (although I learned quite a few interesting facts, like about the extremely disturbing federal mass extermination of Canadian geese and goose eggs in NYC after the Sully Sullenberger Hudson landing).
The last sentence in the book sums it up perfectly: "I supposed I want to give a heart to the barbarian, and to normalize the need to get intimately close to apex predators, so close even that you become one with the tiger".
January 30, 2019
Reading this extended essay about human interactions with apex predators was something like studying Louis Wain's paintings of cats to glean information about real-life cats. Church's take on his subject isn't just "personal"--it borders on "incomprehensible" and even has a touch of "scary" to it.
The logic in this extended essay is highly unusual. Arguments are propped up in a spindly way by fanciful speculation rather than by evidence or reasoning. Conclusions circle back to the beginning in an incantatory way. The author makes connections that don't seem very supportable outside of their own transitive and self-referential existence. The author also makes many connections having to do with ears, for example, connections between the ear of Evander Holyfield, the ear of Vincent van Gogh, and the ear of a woman named Charla whose face was bitten off by a chimpanzee (but her ears remained intact). What is the nature of the connection between these ears? Hmm.
The author writes many sentences in third-person-plural, as if to assume that the reader will naturally have feelings in concert with the author, although I personally can't remember feeling these feelings before, myself. For example:
what many of us want is perhaps less like being violently raped by an apex predator and more akin to the French concept of jouissance, which implies a kind of ecstatic experience, a mixture of pleasure and pain that shatters the self and, thus, provides an opportunity to reassemble oneself....It's the desire to be fucked to death and to be reborn.
It's possible the book is one big send-up of strange academic pursuits of the kind that are supported by grants and regularly mocked by people writing stories about all the silly things your tax dollars are used for. I'm not sure.
It entertained me. In a shock-value kind of way.
The logic in this extended essay is highly unusual. Arguments are propped up in a spindly way by fanciful speculation rather than by evidence or reasoning. Conclusions circle back to the beginning in an incantatory way. The author makes connections that don't seem very supportable outside of their own transitive and self-referential existence. The author also makes many connections having to do with ears, for example, connections between the ear of Evander Holyfield, the ear of Vincent van Gogh, and the ear of a woman named Charla whose face was bitten off by a chimpanzee (but her ears remained intact). What is the nature of the connection between these ears? Hmm.
The author writes many sentences in third-person-plural, as if to assume that the reader will naturally have feelings in concert with the author, although I personally can't remember feeling these feelings before, myself. For example:
what many of us want is perhaps less like being violently raped by an apex predator and more akin to the French concept of jouissance, which implies a kind of ecstatic experience, a mixture of pleasure and pain that shatters the self and, thus, provides an opportunity to reassemble oneself....It's the desire to be fucked to death and to be reborn.
It's possible the book is one big send-up of strange academic pursuits of the kind that are supported by grants and regularly mocked by people writing stories about all the silly things your tax dollars are used for. I'm not sure.
It entertained me. In a shock-value kind of way.
July 22, 2017
Violent encounters between humans and predators are considered to explore the line, or lack thereof, between humans and wild animals.
August 2, 2017
The chapters on human/large predator animal interactions were decent. The stuff on Mike Tyson and TV shows that only Generation Xers care about, well, I have no idea why that stuff was in this book.
August 9, 2019
A brilliant read that encompasses the ecological destruction that was the main cause of the man-animal conflict here.
August 11, 2016
Muscular, vulnerable, twitchy, and relentlessly curious, Steven Church’s awesome One With the Tiger stalks some of our most absurd, sometimes-violent, and uncontainable compulsions for communion and self-destruction, and finds, lurking within them, such a fragile, funny, and heartbreaking humanity that it’s all we can do as readers to leap and leap into the exhilarating zoo pit of this book, and to emerge as better, more baffling, and more beautiful mutants. Church’s interrogation of our cockeyed innateness braids evisceration with assurance, bite with whisper. This book tears us open by way of acceptance, the drive to assuage, the electric and desperate urge to unearth the secrets fueling the shadowy back-alleys of our hearts. I never wanted Church’s wild and bemused treatises on absorption, collision, truth, family, ecstasy, strange spiritual yearning and—ultimately—even stranger empathy to ever stop.
February 5, 2017
Super interesting and very 'Church': circuitous in its journey, intriguing and compelling. There are so many places I connected with his experience (growing up, we'd seen the same movies, read the same books) that I felt like I was talking to someone I'd grown up with. And bonus? My copy is signed since I met him at Powell's when he gave a reading :)
February 16, 2023
I've reread different essays from this book an uncountable number of times. Every time I come back to it, there is more to learn about myself and about Church's perspective on life. I've written a more in-depth review and analysis over on my blog: https://www.marcuslynnk.com/post/one-... but tldr I'm going to recommend this book to anyone I believe could appreciate the frank and unromantic view of violence as part of the human condition.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews