author results for Vaillant, John

Fire Weather

Vaillant, John — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

"In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. It was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. This book is a suspenseful account of one of North America's most devastating forest fires-and a stark exploration of our dawning era of climate catastrophes"-- Provided by publisher.

Los hijos del jaguar

Vaillant, John — Sun, 31 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Una pipa de agua está varada en medio del desierto de Arizona. En su interior viajan varios migrantes que, tras cruzar la frontera y descomponerse el transporte, son abandonados por los coyotes quienes no dudan en dejarlos encerrados en esa prisión de metal en medio de la nada. Un celular se convierte en el único vínculo de Héctor con el exterior. En cuatro días en los que el agua y la comida se van agotando, comienza a grabar mensajes de audio que envía al único número que tiene de Estados Unidos, pero ¿llegan a su destino?Un amigo perseguido por una empresa involucrada en un escándalo de productos transgénicos, un arqueólogo maravillado con los tesoros que se encuentran en tierras oaxaqueñas, una historia de amor aparentemente imposible, un secreto guardado durante años sobre el origen de su familia, un complicado viaje que marcará para siempre el destino de su padre. Héctor nos narra su historia en un intento por sobrellevar las horas desesperadas de encierro y, con ella, reflexiona sobre las pasiones humanas, la ambición, la identidad y las razones más íntimas por las que millones de personas de todo el mundo emigran con la esperanza de cambiar su futuro. De la magistral pluma de Valliant llega una historia para reflexionar sobre la humanidad y el mundo que la rodea.

The Jaguar's Children

Vaillant, John — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT

From the best-selling author of The Tiger andamp;#160;and The Golden Spruce , this debut novel is a gripping survival story of a young man trapped, perhaps fatally, during a border crossing. andamp;#160; Hector is trapped. The water truck, sealed to hide its human cargo, has broken down. The coyotes have taken all the passengers' money for a mechanic and have not returned. Those left behind have no choice but to wait. Hector finds a name in his friend Cesar's phone. AnniMac. A name with an American number. He must reach her, both for rescue and to pass along the message Cesar has come so far to deliver. But are his messages going through? Over four days, as water and food run low, Hector tells how he came to this desperate place. His story takes us from Oaxaca andamp;mdash; its rich culture, its rapid change andamp;mdash; to the dangers of the border. It exposes the tangled ties between Mexico and El Norte andamp;mdash; land of promise and opportunity, homewrecker and unreliable friend. And it reminds us of the power of storytelling and the power of hope, as Hector fights to ensure his message makes it out of the truck and into the world. Both an outstanding suspense novel and an arresting window into the relationship between two great cultures, The Jaguar's Children andamp;#160;shows how deeply interconnected all of us, always, are.

The Jaguar's Children

Vaillant, John — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT

"Hector is trapped. The water truck, sealed to hide its human cargo, has broken down. The coyotes have taken all the passenters' money for a mechanic and have not returned...." --inside front cover.

The Jaguar's Children

Vaillant, John — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT

This "extraordinary" novel of one man's border crossing reveals "a human history of sorrow and suffering, all of it beginning with the thirst to be free" (NPR). Héctor is trapped. The water truck, sealed to hide its human cargo, has broken down. The coyotes have taken all the passengers' money for a mechanic and have not returned. Héctor finds a name in his friend César's phone: AnniMac. A name with an American number. He must reach her, both for rescue and to pass along the message César has come so far to deliver. But are his messages going through? Over four days, as water and food run low, Héctor tells how he came to this desperate place. His story takes us from Oaxaca—;its rich culture, its rapid change—;to the dangers of the border, exposing the tangled ties between Mexico and El Norte. And it reminds us of the power of storytelling and the power of hope, as Héctor fights to ensure his message makes it out of the truck and into the world. Both an outstanding suspense novel and an arresting window into the relationship between two great cultures, The Jaguar's Children shows how deeply interconnected all of us are. "This is what novels can do—;illuminate shadowed lives, enable us to contemplate our own depths of kindness, challenge our beliefs about fate. Vaillant's use of fact to inspire fiction brings to mind a long list of powerful novels from the past decade or so: What is the What by Dave Eggers; The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif; The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult." —;Amanda Eyre Ward, The New York Times Book Review "[A] heartbreaker . . . Wrenching . . . with a voice fresh and plangent enough to disarm resistance." —;The Boston Globe "Fearless." and#x2014;;The Globe and Mail

The Tiger

Vaillant, John — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

It’s December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. As the trackers sift through the gruesome remains of the victims, they discover that these attacks aren’t random: the tiger is apparently engaged in a vendetta. Injured, starving, and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again.
As he re-creates these extraordinary events, John Vaillant gives us an unforgettable portrait of this spectacularly beautiful and mysterious region. We meet the native tribes who for centuries have worshipped and lived alongside tigers, even sharing their kills with them. We witness the arrival of Russian settlers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, soldiers and hunters who greatly diminished the tiger populations. And we come to know their descendants, who, crushed by poverty, have turned to poaching and further upset the natural balance of the region.
This ancient, tenuous relationship between man and predator is at the very heart of this remarkable book. Throughout we encounter surprising theories of how humans and tigers may have evolved to coexist, how we may have developed as scavengers rather than hunters, and how early Homo sapiens may have fit seamlessly into the tiger’s ecosystem. Above all, we come to understand the endangered Siberian tiger, a highly intelligent super-predator that can grow to ten feet long, weigh more than six hundred pounds, and range daily over vast territories of forest and mountain.
Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger circles around three main characters: Vladimir Markov, a poacher killed by the tiger; Yuri Trush, the lead tracker; and the tiger himself. It is an absolutely gripping tale of man and nature that leads inexorably to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the taiga.

Fire Weather

Vaillant, John — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce
“Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page…Captures the majesty and horror of one of [our] great disasters.” —David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.
For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.
With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF of maps, images, and charts from the book.

The Tiger

Vaillant, John — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A gripping story of man pitted against nature’s most fearsome and efficient predator. This "travelogue about tiger poaching in Russia’s far east opens up a new genre ... [the] conservation thriller" (Nature).
Outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East a man-eating tiger is on the prowl. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s murdering them, almost as if it has a vendetta. A team of trackers is dispatched to hunt down the tiger before it strikes again. They know the creature is cunning, injured, and starving, making it even more dangerous. As John Vaillant re-creates these extraordinary events, he gives us an unforgettable and masterful work of narrative nonfiction that combines a riveting portrait of a stark and mysterious region of the world and its people, with the natural history of nature’s most deadly predator.

The Golden Spruce

Vaillant, John — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

A tale of obsession so fierce that a man kills the thing he loves most: the only giant golden spruce on earth.

When a shattered kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Northwest, they reignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest. Five months earlier, logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin had plunged naked into a river in British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw. When his night's work was done, a unique Sitka spruce, 165 feet tall and covered with luminous golden needles, teetered on its stump. Two days later it fell.

As vividly as John Krakauer puts readers on Everest, John Vaillant takes us into the heart of North America's last great forest.