Read Beat (...and repeat)

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Jun 2026

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If you're like me, you like to know things but how much time to invest? That's the question. Here's the answer: Read Beat--Interviews with authors of new releases. These aren't book reviews but short (about 25-30 minutes on the average) chats with folks that usually have taken a lot of time to research a topic, enough to write a book about it. Hopefully, there's a topic or two that interests you. I try to come up with subjects that fascinate me or I need to know more about. Hopefully, listeners will agree. I'm Steve Tarter, former reporter for the Peoria Journal Star and a contributor to WCBU-FM, the Peoria public radio outlet, from 20202 to 2024. I post regularly on stevetarter.substack.com.

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June 12, 2026Episode 1031 min

“America’s Hometown Movie Houses: Please Remain Standing” by Benita VanWinkle

Benita VanWinkle likes going to the movies. She’s gone to theaters in every state of the union. But she doesn’t always stay for the main feature.Instead, VanWinkle, an art professor at High Point University in North Carolina, pursues a picture show of her own. Over the years, she’s photographed some 1,200 theaters across the country.Almost 400 of those pictures make up her new book, America’s Hometown Movie Theaters: Please Remain Standing. It all started at her hometown theater near Largo, Fla. She had a college photo assignment and decided that the ornate theater she knew as a kid would make a great subject with its interior artwork of the history of sound and motion in movies with Egyptian characters and symbols (“They scared me as a kid.”)Part of the title of her book comes from Clarence, the former Marine who ran that Largo theater and always played the “Stars and Stripes” before every movie. “If you didn’t stand up, he would stop the film and put the house lights on until people stood up,” said VanWinkle. Sadly, two years after taking her pictures, the theater was torn down by the bank next door, she said.It was later in graduate school at Southern Illinois University that VanWinkle made shooting movie houses her graduate project and her life’s passion. “At first, I just shot theaters in Illinois. I’d stop in every small town and ask people if they had a theater or knew of any in the area,” she said.Soon she developed her own databank of movie houses. In addition to acquiring theater directories from different decades, she welcomed the Cinema Treasures website that started in 2003. “That was a history of theaters, a crowdsourcing project where people could provide additional details. That changed my life,” she said.“I will shoot abandoned theaters if I come across them, but I don’t focus on that,” she said. She credited photographer Matt Lambros, author of After the Final Curtain: The Fall of the American Movie Theater, with doing amazing work in the abandoned theater category. “I put more energy into theaters that are maintained, rebuilt, refurbished, or repurposed,” said VanWinkle.One of the most distinctive examples of a repurposed theater is in Kearney, Neb., she said. The old Fort Theatre is now a dentist's office but while the theater seats have been taken out, the place remains in good enough shape that it could be made into a theater again. Ironically, a popcorn machine and candy display, the very things that often drive one to the dentist, are displayed in the building’s front window, she said.Kearney is also home to the World Theatre, a nonprofit, volunteer-run theater, said VanWinkle, who’s come to know a lot about what communities around the country are doing with their theaters. In Viborg, S.D., a town of only 350 people, she photographed the Lund Theatre, where she captured the image of a four-year-old looking out through the theater’s glass door just as she snapped a picture of the theater’s exterior.VanWinkle also told of the art teacher, “a one-woman tornado,” who organizes a rummage sale twice a year to benefit the State Theater in Nashville, Ill. “I love hearing from people,” she said, referring to tips she gets on movie houses she hasn’t photographed yet.Her book is on the street, but VanWinkle still makes the rounds of movie houses with a camera in hand. This summer, she plans to visit the Russell Theatre in Maysville, Ky., the Maynard Arts Center just outside Boston, and the Little Theatre in Rochester, N.Y.The Little Theatre is one she’s been to before. When the pandemic hit, the theater backers decided it was a good time to overhaul a theater built in 1929. VanWinkle was there to photograph the project when it was completed. Today, the Little Theatre runs a mix of indie and foreign films, rotating art displays, and music, along with a casual cafe. One of the customer comments online raves about real butter on the popcorn and “generous home-baked desserts at great prices.”When it comes to rave reviews, VanWinkle credits her editor, Beth Daugherty, founder of Bauer & Dean Publishers, a firm that specializes in architectural books, with bringing her book to life. “It wouldn’t have happened without her,” she said. As for her next project, VanWinkle’s not sure if it will be a comprehensive look at theaters in Chicago, or another volume of movie houses from around the country (after all, she has 800 pictures that haven't been used yet). But whatever it is, she’s a believer in the power of entertainment as a group activity rather than a solitary exercise in front of a TV set.

June 6, 2026Episode 918 min

"A High Price for Freedom" by Clyde W. Ford

Don’t expect a big celebration on Juneteenth (June 19) from author Clyde W. Ford, who explains in A High Price for Freedom.“What a wonderful day that first Juneteenth must have been. Fetters gone. Shackles removed. Whips silenced. Uninformed formerly enslaved men and women reveling in their newly-found freedom. But there’s a problem with this idyllic picture of Juneteenth—most of the above events never happened, even though they are taken as unquestioned truth by Americans Black and white,” stated Ford.The facts, the author declares, are that, first of all, slaves in Texas were aware of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. “We had papers just like we have now,” said Felix Haywood, a former slave who was in Texas for the first Juneteenth, when interviewed in the 1930s at the age of 92. The 2,000 Union troops that went to Texas after the Civil War didn’t go to tell the slaves they were free, but to remind the white Texas slaveholders that they had to release those they continued to enslave, said Ford.Texas is where a lot of slaves wound up because, during the Civil War, a number of southern slaveholders marched as many as 150,000 Black men and women to Texas in order to keep them out of the Union Army’s hands, stated Ford, describing that movement as the second slavery trail of tears. The first one involved the transfer of slaves from tobacco states like Virginia and Maryland to the deep South in the 1830s when cotton became the chief crop.At about the same time that Major General George Granger was delivering his Juneteenth message to Texan slaveholders, President Andrew Johnson, having taken over that spring for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, was derailing compensation plans for slaves worked out while Lincoln was still in office.“Union General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton seemed to recognize that President Lincoln needed a plan to deal with the four to five million men and women who would be freed by the Emancipation Proclamation if the Union prevailed in the war,” noted Ford.Rev. Garrison Frazier, himself a former slave, replied to questions from Sherman and Stanton on the evening of Jan. 12, 1865 at a meeting that sought to find an answer to a looming problem as the war drew to a close: the huge population of former slaves “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it or make it our own,” said Frazier.Four days after the meeting, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, accepted by Lincoln and otherwise known as “40 acres and a mule,” said Ford. That order sought to redistribute 400,000 acres of prime Southern coastline to emancipated slaves, land that formerly belonged to Southern slaveholders. The plan was to allow African Americans to organize and govern their own communities, Ford said.But Johnson had other ideas. Shortly after Lincoln died in April 1865, Johnson issued 14,000 pardons to wealthy Southern slaveholders, and, within seven weeks of taking office, coinciding almost exactly with the first Juneteenth, Johnson rescinded Special Field Order No. 15.Any lands that had been confiscated were returned to their original owners, said Ford, recalling a quote from W.E.B. DuBois: “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.”By June 1865, 40,000 Black Americans who had been awarded land were formally displaced, forced into becoming sharecroppers and tenant farmers.“Personally, as a Black Man, I find it very difficult to celebrate Juneteenth because what are we celebrating?” asked Ford. “Are you celebrating the fact that Black folks learned they were free? They already knew that. Or are you celebrating the fact that white folks were told to stop killing and brutalizing Black folks?"A High Price for Freedom features a number of other essays by Ford addressing the struggle for freedom by African Americans in the United States.

June 3, 2026Episode 825 min

“Disposing of Modernity” by Rebecca Graff

If time travel ever becomes a thing, the Chicago World’s Fair held in 1893 might be one of the leading attractions for time travelers. Here was an exposition, spread across almost 700 acres in Jackson Park, some seven miles from Chicago’s Loop, that sold 27 million tickets in its six-month run.Some 200 buildings were erected that included displays from nations across the world, public comfort stations, soda pavilions, and restaurants. You had electricity and flush toilets for all to use.“Add to all of this an elevated train that looped around the fairgrounds, the sounds of tourists talking mixed with band concerts, sights of ‘Little Egypt’ performing the danse du ventre, or children doing gymnastics in the model kindergarten, smells of baking bread from the French bakery exhibit or beer and wurst from the German Village, and one starts to get a small sense of the teeming character of the 1893 fair,” noted Rebecca Graff, an anthropology professor at Lake Forest College.Graff recalled a teacher telling her grad-school class years earlier that the Chicago fair site was “the center of the world” 100 years ago. That motivated her to find out what was left of the great fair often cited as a watershed moment in the development of modern, industrial American society.The result is captured in Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism During Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair, Graff's book that details some of what lay behind (or under) White City.To fully appreciate the 1893 event in Chicago, one must first understand the concept of a world’s fair. Between 1865 and 1925, 360 million people attended world’s fairs in Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. “Fairs were venues within which to display the growing and changing material world,” noted Graff.The United States, and Chicago, in particular, were pulsing with power in 1893. While the U.S. frontier may have closed (Frederick Jackson Turner made that declaration in Chicago that year), the country was flexing its railroad and steam muscle in the era that became known as the Gilded Age. Chicago, 20 years removed from the great fire, wanted to show its resurgence at the fair—not only as a meatpacking and transportation center, but also as a city with world-class architects such as Louis Sullivan and a young draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright.The fair saw the introduction of the frankfurter that became known as the Chicago hot dog. White City was also criticized by Frederick Douglass, then ambassador to Haiti, for excluding African Americans from a more prominent role at the fair. It was a transformative event. Six months later, it was gone.That kind of conspicuous disposal, the disposing of modernity, is one of the stories of White City.

May 30, 2026Episode 722 min

“The Courtyard” by Alexa Morris and Benjamin Parket

The Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II brought hardship to many, especially if they were Jewish. As German rule tightened, Jewish families were at risk of being rounded up and sent to concentration camps like Auschwitz.The Courtyard is an account of one Jewish family that survived the war thanks to the assistance of brave neighbors and a miracle or two along the way, said Morris, whose father-in law was Ben Parket.Morris said the book came about through her collaboration with Parket, who turns 93 this summer. Before war broke out, the Parkets—Ben, his parents, and two older brothers—lived in a tiny but sunny fourth-floor apartment that overlooked a large, open courtyard, a busy place in the heart of Paris, a center of industry, she said.“The neighborhood was known for woodworking with furniture makers, upholsterers, and painters busy at their trade. Ben’s father, Joseph, was a varnisher who had his workshop in the same courtyard,” said Morris.In August of 1941, Joseph Parket was arrested along with other Jewish men who had immigrated from Eastern Europe. He was detained in a camp outside Paris that would become the primary French gateway to Auschwitz. The first of the miracles occurred when Joseph was released due to illness and sent home in November. “During the entire war, only 800 of the 70,000 people detained at the camp were ever released,” noted Morris.Ben’s father came home and recovered, but in July of 1942, the entire family was marked for arrest. Luckily, a courtyard neighbor who worked at the police station warned the Parket family in advance. The family wound up staying in an empty warehouse nearby. They made do in a single room the size of a one-car garage for two years without electricity, plumbing, or running water. At night, they had to be completely silent.“Protecting the family was a true community effort,” said Morris. Neighboring shopkeepers—a grocer and a deli owner—set aside food for the family each day, food that nine-year-old Ben had to go and collect each day, a task that "should have been terrifying, but Ben said it wasn’t. Perhaps because it was his only time outside, it became his favorite part of the day,” she said.After the war, the Parket family emigrated to Israel before Ben, on his own, traveled to the United States for college. He attended Stanford University and settled in the Bay Area. He was an architect until he retired in his 50s. Perhaps because of the time he spent hiding during the war, Ben developed a passion for the outdoors, said Morris, noting that he remains an avid biker and hiker to this day.

May 29, 2026Episode 628 min

“The Devil’s Castle” by Susanne Paola Antonetta

The horrors of the Holocaust were preceded in Nazi Germany by the conversion of five asylums and an abandoned jail, which were transformed into gas chambers, killing tens of thousands of patients. That’s a story that Susanne Paola Antonetta tells in The Devil’s Castle, a book that started with the Nazi massacre of the disabled, she said. “The subtitle, Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today, grew with the book,” stated Antonetta. ”Euthanasia grew out of the 19th-century eugenics movement, the drive to remove ‘tainted’ hereditary lines from society. Eugenics flourished in the United States before and after the war. It hasn’t ended,” she stated.Antonetta focuses on several people in the history she provides for a book she said took eight years to compile. “I even had to learn another language: German,” she stated. Two of Antonetta’s “heroes” are Paul Schreber, a German judge who was able to make his own case to force his release from an asylum, and Dorothea Buck, a longtime activist who wrote lucidly of her own psychotic episodes.“Buck had a vision in 1936 of Hitler’s coming war proving ‘monstrous.’ Buck’s mother took her to a doctor, the vision of monstrous war a symptom, like the loony cartoon prophet’s apocalypse sign. If only millions of people had had her symptom,” noted Antonetta.Buck died in 2019 at the age of 102, said Antonetta, who “found her book, her talks, her letters.” “I followed her star with her during my own psychotic break,” said the author, who’s had to deal with her own bipolar condition.Another major figure in the book is Emil Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist who was both eugenicist and anti-semite. Kraepelin believed Jews had a natural connection to mental illness, and he trained some of the worst Nazi doctors, noted Antonetta. Kraepelin, who died in 1926, remains popular, even considered “the father of modern psychiatry,” having devised an elaborate system of psychiatric classification, she said.The title of the book refers to what the asylum known as Sonnenstein later became called. Once a castle-fortress dating back to the Middle Ages, the buildings were renovated in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1811, the Prussian government established an asylum at one end of the sprawling fortress. Antonetta noted that a study of how society treats mental problems shows that ideas on finding a cure often change over time.Under its first director, Ernst Pienitz, Sonnenstein became Europe’s pinnacle asylum, said Antonetta. Pienetz released a quarter of his patients, fully cured, within a year of their entry, remarkable for that time and that patient population, she said.The reputation made Sonnenstein a teaching hospital, the destination for hundreds of doctors to learn how mental illness could be treated humanely , said Antonetta, noting that less than a century later, the once-fabled institution had become a killing ground “where patients died by gas and were thrown in the river below in the form of ash.”While stressing the failures in the treatment of mentally disabled people, Antonetta sees progress being made despite a reliance on drugs for treatment. She looks to the future and calls for change. “It’s time to end the use of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in psychiatry,” she said. “This work is the fruit of the poisoned tree, in its Kraepelinian roots and in its development by those with a financial stake in finding people ill.”

May 22, 2026Episode 526 min

“Why Q Needs U” by Danny Bate

So where did we get all these letters that children learn as their ABC’s? Danny Bate has the answer in his book, “Why Q Needs U.”Born and raised in England and now living in Prague, Bate is a linguist, writer, broadcaster, and podcaster (A Language I Love is…), Bate admits to being obsessed by language and its history.“Nowadays, the alphabet has become so successful that we rarely recognize its achievement,” he noted in his book regarding the alphabet's development over 4,000 years. “Yet over the course of its long development, nothing is fixed, and every letter has a story to tell.”Bate tells each of the 26 letters' stories, starting logically with A. Tracing the letter’s history from Egypt, through the ancient Phoenicians to the Greeks who gave us “alpha” (as in alphabet), Bate explains how language evolves over time.There’s a certain excitement that comes with discovering where our letters come from. In his review of the book for The Times, James McConnachie seems positively elated:“I have been able to tell everyone within earshot that Q has a tail because it was once a picture of a monkey, that O used to have a dot in the middle because it used to be the Egyptian hieroglyph for an eye, and that A — bear with me here — started life as a picture of an ox’s head (because it used to represent the glottal stop that began the ancient Semitic word for ox, ’alp) and then morphed into a vowel over time while also somehow turning itself upside down, the wonderful result being that the two legs on our capital A started life as … horns. And’alp, of course, became alpha.”English has its quirks, Bate admits. We’re talking about the fact that there’s a hard c (coconut) and a soft c (cigar) and don't forget the “magic e,” which Bate explains is a split digraph. But don’t worry, it all becomes clear once you follow the explanations Bate provides. We can thank the Romans for coming up with cursive handwriting, and we learn that the letter W is a child of the fall of Rome. Want clarification? Listen to the interview with the author.

May 22, 2026Episode 424 min

“A Little Piece of Cuba” by Barbara Caver

At a time when U.S.-Cuban relations have probably never been worse, there’s Barbara Caver’s “A Little Piece of Cuba,” a book that explores her own journey “to become Cubana-Americana.”Caver’s mother was born in Cuba before leaving for the United States with her family at the age of seven in 1959. While the author, who lives in New York, doesn’t speak Spanish and only visited Cuba for five days in 2017, Caver’s story is a family memoir, her effort to forge a relationship with Cuba.“I’ve traveled to many far-flung places, and Cuba is the only one that I can remember with all five senses,” she wrote. “For my grandparents, Cuba was in the tiles on the kitchen floor and hanging on the walls of their home, but the walls and floor are taken for granted and not often noticed. My grandmother’s story, my mother’s story, my family’s story belong to them. I have my own version of the Cuban American story to tell, and in that story, I embark on a brave adventure to a forbidden place, curious to know more, and discover that Senora Cuba wanted to know me too,” she noted.On the U.S. political scene, Cuba has become the proverbial football. Depending on which political party is in power, so goes U.S. treatment of Cuba. President Barack Obama visited Cuba in 2016, the same year that Fidel Castro died at the age of 90. Obama loosened restrictions with Cuba, but President Donald Trump reinstated them when he took office in 2017.In 2022, President Joe Biden eased restrictions on the country once again, only for Trump to restore a hard-line policy upon his return to the White House in 2025.Now Raúl Castro, who stepped down as Cuba's leader in 2018, is back in the news. At age 94, he’s just been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department. That indictment of Castro “comes at a tense time for US-Cuban relations, with the Trump administration declaring the Cuban government is a threat to US national security. Cuba is also dealing with a collapse of its energy sector due to an oil blockade following the U.S. attack on Cuba’s oil-rich ally Venezuela,” stated CNN.Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that widespread blackouts are common on the fuel-starved island. The country of some 10 million people (2 million in Havana) is “trapped in the vise of a repressive regime and punishing American sanctions,” the paper reported.“I worry over the political tensions and embargo. The present policy is not fair to the American people, Cuban Americans, or the Cuban people,” said Caver.To better understand the situation, “I think people need to hear more personal stories about Cuba,” she said. She provides her own personal story in this book. “If one day you decide to visit Cuba, you find yourself on TripAdvisor or some other website, and you stumble across Casa de Maria Mendoza, well, I hope you know what you’re in for. If you’re looking for mojitos on white sand beaches and rides at sunset in Franken cars, you should move on. Casa Maria offers an unparalleled immersion and exploration into Cuban culture for people who always questioned what it meant to be Cuban…Casa de Maria might just change your life.”

May 11, 2026Episode 325 min

"Heartland" by Keith O'Brien

The saga of basketball star Larry Bird invariably culminates in the Bird-Magic Johnson story, two players who met in the most-watched basketball game of all time, the 1979 NCAA championship game between Indiana State and Michigan State, and then went on to "save" the NBA, each winning titles for their respective teams, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers.But Keith O'Brien saw another story: the rise of Larry Bird from a small town in Indiana whose collegiate career was very nearly derailed before it began.Bird famously walked away from a spot on the Bobby Knight-led Indiana University team and was picking up garbage in his hometown before arriving on the Indiana State campus.O'Brien's exhaustive research uncovers the contributions of people who helped an 18-year-old kid find his way. Friends, fellow players, and coaches -- even an enterprising university president -- recognized the greatness of Larry Bird, perhaps even more than he did.Bird's epic season at Indiana State, when the team went unbeaten until the championship game with Michigan State, is chronicled in full detail by O'Brien, who called the school's success "one of the original Cinderella stories in basketball."Bird's success came despite his becoming increasingly hostile toward the print media as the team drew the country's attention. O'Brien noted that Bird, a man who liked to keep his private life private, was even able to cope with the "great white hope" label the media gave him on his way to the NBA, a league dominated by Black stars.O'Brien noted that while much is made of Bird's reticence with the media, he also never suffered the consequences of altercations with fans that took place on the basketball court.But his accomplishments on that court continue to shine. The magic of Larry Bird lives on, said O'Brien. "Local tourism officials estimate he is worth at least $7 million annually to the economy of Terre Haute," he said, referring to the town where Indiana State University is located."Almost five decades since his last college game, Bird is still keeping the lights on, putting people in seats, drawing fans downtown, and making Terre Haute relevant," said O'Brien.

May 10, 2026Episode 227 min

“The Navigator’s Letter” by Jan Cress Dondi

A true story, The Navigator’s Letter is a tale of uncanny coincidences: two friends from the same small town in Illinois join the Army Air Corps in World War II. Both become navigators. Both were assigned to B-24 Liberators. Both flew missions over Europe. Both of their planes were forced down over Ploesti in Romania, a target for Allied bombers that wanted to knock out Nazi Germany’s primary fuel source.Jan Cress Dondi has written an account that captures the sense of the all-involving conflict that WWII became. It was a war that, once it began to rage, reached every small town, every family. Dondi’s discovery of a footlocker filled with letters in her mother’s cellar said those letters reached out to her. “While the early letters revealed a prewar innocence, as they moved into 1943, reading turned to a curiosity of how war impacted family. As for WWII itself, I found how little I understood about this major event,” she wrote.But the letters led the author on a quest that included interviews with the main characters and the people who knew them. She found and used a POW diary, memoirs from crewmembers, scrapbooks, and newspaper clippings. She dug up records from the National Archives, both American and German.“At its heart, The Navigator’s Letter is a personal narrative,” noted Dondi. “It’s a true story about three youths growing up (in Hillsboro, Illinois) at the advent of WWII. The main characters, John B. and Bob (Dondi’s father), drive the story through Polley’s eyes—a journey that took two young men from the heartland of America to a cauldron of Hitler’s crude oil at Ploesti.”Dondi’s description of the bombing runs over Ploesti, the heavily protected Nazi stronghold, reveals the horrifying fate faced by those flying planes at tree-top level into the teeth of German anti-aircraft guns.

May 1, 2026Episode 124 min

"Tigers Between Empires" by Jonathan Slaght

It’s a familiar story: the animals we’ve all known since we were children, the lions, tigers, and elephants, all disappearing from the wilds due to loss of habitat, hunters, or a changing environment.So how gratifying is it to learn that in one part of the world, a wintry forest area between Russia and China, that the Siberian tiger is actually making a comeback?That’s what Jonathan Slaght writes about in Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China.The proper reference for the Siberian cat is Amur tiger for animals that live in the Amur River basin, which forms part of the border between Russia and China. By whatever name, they are an endangered species. In the final years of the Cold War, only a few hundred of these great cats remained. And make no mistake, the Siberian tiger is a great cat. It weighs in at almost 700 pounds, and can reach 11 feet in length. A tiger can leap up to 15 feet in the air and drag or carry prey weighing 1,000 pounds. It can devour 60 pounds of meat at one sitting--but seldom does A meal can take many days to find in the wild, especially with changing political conditions. When the Soviet Union fell, catastrophe arrived, with poaching and logging taking a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species.Slaght, who now travels the globe for the Wildlife Conservation Society, charts the incredible story of a 35-year program that brought Russian and American scientists together to help save the tigers. He shows how this coalition laid the foundations of new tiger research across Asia, transforming public opinion around tigers from something to be feared and hunted to creatures we must protect.Today, tigers occupy only 7 percent of the land they did 100 years ago, disappearing from the wild across Bali to Iran. In the ongoing global crisis of species destruction, Slaght brings us hope for the future. Slaght gives credit to the people who worked on the project over the years, Americans like Dale Miquelle and John Goodrich along with several Russian scientists.Slaght’s account of how the tiger project progressed reveals that conservation is not for the weak of heart. Tagging a wild tiger so that it can be tracked for research purposes is no simple matter. Is there enough tranquilizer in the dart to do the job? What about the aim? What about confronting an enraged tiger caught in a trap?There’s also endless waiting for researchers to find their tigers. Dealing with shortages in the field was made even worse with the collapse of the Society Union, a time when the research project was just coming together.Slaght cited another possible success story is underway with the relocation of Amur tigers to Kazakhstan. Tigers are being reintroduced into the Balkhash Nature Reserve, an environment that closely mirrors where tigers roamed many years ago. Slaght’s first book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, also documents a conservation story. But the difference between owl and tiger is one of territory. While the owl secures only a small part of the forest, one lone Siberian tiger ranges in an area that might encompass more than 500 square miles.While powerful hunters, tigers are at the mercy of the environment. With the recent outbreak of African Swine Fever striking down Russia’s population of wild boar, a favorite tiger dish, the great cats have had to turn to villages for food. When tigers confront an angry public, it never turns out well for the tiger.Yet Slaght believes progress is being made. If not for the animals' sake, for our own. International collaboration is essential to conservation, he noted.