Another random book I read on an airplane after picking it up from the new section in the library based entirely on its interesting title. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great either, and should be read only if you are already very interested in the content. To the scores:
Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger, by Margaret Mittelback & Michael Crewdson
Concept: 7
Presentation: 5
Writing Quality: 6
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 5
Entertainment Value: 6
Rereadability: 3
Overall: 5.5
There's nothing really wrong with the book, but there's nothing real special about it either. It's basically a somewhat anarchistic travelogue detailing the wacky, naturalistic travels and travails of the two authors and their pot-smoking artist friend Alexis Rockman as the three of them bang around Tasmania, hunting for various odd local animals and interacting with numerous odd local locals. A decent amount of historical and biological information is worked into the book, and it's not uninformative; it's just sort of there. This might have played better as a series of magazine articles; each one detailing another adventure as they hunted for the world's largest freshwater crayfish, or staked out roadkill and waited for nocturnal Tasmania Devils (devils, not tigers -- the former are common, the latter are bigfoot-esque in their probably extinction and popularity).
As for the tigers of the title, they were real animals, large masupial predators that lived on Australia and the island of Tasmania, until the white man brought civilization and extinction. The last one died in rather tragic fashion in a zoo in Tasmania in 1936, though many people in Tasmania still think (and hope) that they might persist, hiding in the dense forests and jungles of the island. The book does not answer that question, but that's more about the inability of proving a negative than anything else.
There are lots of eyewitness sightings and legends and rumors discussed in the book, but no one's brought forth any dead tigers or fur samples or live captures or anything else in more than 60 years, and the authors certainly didn't see one during their brief visit. Hope is not dead, since there are efforts underway to clone them from the DNA in preserved specimens, but it seems pretty clear that there are no surviving Tasmanian Tigers.
Read this book if you're interested in the varied and bizarre wildlife of Tasmania, and you enjoy wacky travelogues. If you're more interested in hard science, or books about cryptozoology, or books about the Tasmanian Tiger, you're better off looking elsewhere.
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