One With the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals

by Steven Church

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593766504
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	11/15/2016
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Steven Church is the author of The Guinness Book of Me: a Memoir of Record, Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents, The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst, and most recently, Ultrasonic, which was featured in the LA Times, The Paris Review, and Tin House, among others. His essays have been published and anthologized widely, including in the Best American Essays (2011) and most recently in After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover The Essays. He's a founding editor and nonfiction editor for the nationally recognized literary magazine The Normal School, and he teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State, where he is the Hallowell Professor of Creative Writing.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for One With the Tiger

"Reading One with the Tiger is like watching Mike Tyson bite off Evander Holyfield's ear or like looking at pictures of the victims of chimpanzee attacks: horrifying and startlingly true." --The Paris Review

"[An] insightful exploration of human infatuation with nonhuman animals." --Publishers Weekly

"Church does well in connecting the human fascination with apex predator behavior and its potential relation to our own animal instincts...[a] captivating study." --Library Journal

"One With the Tiger explores the deep human need to participate in an atavistic ecstasy; to be, as Church puts it "absorbed but not destroyed." Church's approach is not clinical, moralizing, or gee-whiz superficial; it is, to our benefit, essayistic. By circling rather than simplifying, he illuminates the taboo, ever-shifting boundaries between man and animal. Church is the rare author who knows what's interesting-- which is to say, uncomfortable--about his chosen subject." --Kerry Howley, author of Thrown

"One with the Tiger is a meditation on animality and the space between suburbs and savanna, citizenship and savagery. Church is as close to the teeth of the beast as he is to escape. This is his love letter to animal magnetism, primal fear, and the wilderness of human imagination. The genius of this book is how it questions who is in captivity: the tiger in its cage or you." - Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to Dust

"From the iron of a zoo cage's bars to the expanse of our nation's national parks, One With the Tiger examines the spaces in which humans contain animals, and how those acts of containment often fail. Church is a classically essayistic observer--curious, haunted, self-deprecating--and it's through this lens that we're confronted with stories of infamous animal attacks, pop culture icons, and the author's own longing to inch forward as a bear approaches. In this marvelous collection, Church seems to write his consciousness directly onto the page, and in it we can see an entire civilization's clumsy, sometimes desperate, attempts to understand our relationship to the wild." --Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This

"Church has written a funny, smart, and terrifying book that explores the invisible boundaries between human and animal. This sensitive and thoughtful writer allows the reader to hear the siren call of the wild and step deep into the existential anxiety of what it means to be human." --Jennifer Percy, author of Demon Camp

"One With the Tiger, Steven Church stalks the entire genre of nature writing, rips it down to the raw bone, then reassembles the parts into something totally new and utterly compelling. Like the best of John Krakauer or Rebecca Solnit, the narrative pulls you in and absolutely refuses to let you go--or forget. Church is writing at the very apex of his game, and One with the Tiger is likely the most innovative, disturbing, and brilliant book you'll read all year." --Justin Hocking, author of The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld

"Some of us are born with a lust for the ledges, for any chance to make the leap. In this mesmerizing collection, Steven Church proves, once again, that he is a master of evaporating lines between fact and fiction, imagination and memory. 'It's strange how a subject overtakes you, ' Church tells us. This book overtook me." --Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren't and editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

"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." --Matthew Gavin Frank, author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost

"Church's essays do what only the best essays can -- they hold countless tensions in a single paragraph. One with the Tiger is as funny as it is rigorous, as curious as it is vulnerable, an ecstatic combination of hope and doom." --Lucas Mann, author of Lord Fear

"The further Church leads us through the explorations in One with the Tiger, the richer they become. His own excitement is contagious and you soon find yourself as obsessed as the author himself. Truly intoxicating." --Taylor Goldsmith, lead singer/songwriter of Dawes

Praise for Ultrasonic

"If you liked Leslie Jamison's Empathy Exams or Charles D'Ambrosio's Loitering, try Steven Church's latest collection, Ultrasonic, a group of essays brought together by the theme of sound. Church at times seems to say, I make noise, therefore I am. He dissects the nature of sound waves in a racquetball court, counts the seconds between lightning and thunder, and listens for signs of life from trapped miners--and his digressions invariably come back around to sucker punch you. Church uses sound to explore notions of masculinity and fatherhood, love and death." --The Paris Review

"Steven Church seems to get better with every book he writes, but it's hard to fathom how he is going to top this one. Ultrasonic, in which his intellect is overshadowed only by his humanity, is the best so far." --The Los Angeles Review of Books

"What makes Church's Ultrasonic so invigorating is the incendiary alchemy at work on these pages, a churning, visceral process that demands attention and response. This is what the best writing accomplishes. Beyond just making the personal relatable, or universal--noble achievements in themselves--the best writing sparks a conflagration of memories, welds itself to our psyche and becomes a part of our emotional-intellectual-creative forge. And this in turn is the amalgamation of culture itself, how we ingest, interpret, appropriate and re-mix the art of others into our own offering, our own limb of the cultural sculpture." --Brevity

"Church's Ultrasonic essays don't just stop time, they romp through it." --Essay Daily

"All of the essays in Ultrasonic that require historical inquiry feel thoroughly and affectionately researched, and all the moments that don't require formal research--those which draw on significant moments in Church's own life--manage to strike an effective balance between tenderness and bitterness. The moves Church makes "sound right" because they feel (and are) part of a larger network--a series of stories, memories, ideas, and language games whose careful connections sneak up on you." American Book Review

"The essay at its best has a modal quality to it, moving from description to exposition to meditation, and that modal quality is on display throughout Church's essays--at one point he even ventures into the fictive, going so far as to imagine a racquetball game said to have been played by Elvis Presley the night he died. This ability to move from one mode of writing to another allows Church to create a kind of topography of surface, one whose contours gesture toward the depths beneath it." - The Collapsar.com

"Grand and active listening requires real engagement and unexpected risks. In Steven Church's thoroughly alive compendium, the act of listening itself has the power to create identity, lead inward towards irrevocable grief and awe, and outward into the ever-curious world. How "ultra" in its sonic musings can a mind be? Church's intense soundscape considers subjects as ranging as racquetball, idleness, and firefighting, as poetic as word-origins, and as ancient as birth, love, and loss."
--Lia Purpura, author of Rough Likeness and On Looking

"Each beautifully crafted essay in Steven Church's Ultrasonic invites the reader into an intriguing new world. From Elvis playing racquetball to the drumming heartbeat of an infant to prehistoric bottom feeders, Church's endless curiosity and wildly intelligent prose pierce the literary bull's-eye, spot on.
--Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

"Steven Church has spent the past decade quietly becoming one of our best essayists, and I've been eagerly awaiting the book containing these deeply resonant essays. By turns humorous, reflective, curious, mischievous, and profound, Ultrasonic gives booming confirmation: Church's is a voice we should all listen to." --Patrick Madden, author of Quotidiana

"If Montaigne were a mad cartographer driven to find the true unnamable intersection of earth and human body, with a heart the size of the sun, he would have looked something like Steven Church. The collection begins as a meditation on the ways in which we use sound to draw chalk outlines around the things we can see only incompletely, and then becomes so much more than that--one of the oddest and loveliest meditations on parenthood I've ever read. I love this book beyond reason, and I love it beyond whatever reason's opposite is too."
--Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer

"Steven Church writes with the virtuosic intelligence and digressive curiosity of Montaigne, but beneath the desk his feet are planted firmly on a double bass kick drum. These essays rumble and crack with percussive thunder; they thrum with music and rhythm; like the best heavy metal or rap, they kickstart the heart muscle. With equal parts tenderness and rage, Church tunnels through our noise-laden culture to locate a clear signal: it's empathy--for our children, our neighbors, our fellow humans. I can't think of another collection that has moved me so deeply on both sensory and emotional levels. Ultrasonic is a tale told by a literary mastermind, full of sound and fury, signifying everything."
--Justin Hocking, author of The Great Floodgates to the Wonderworld

"Like Elvis Presley's legendarily fierce final match on the Graceland racquetball court, these essays ricochet, they zing, they demand our attention. Steven Church's spinning insights often come with lightning quickness--surprise attacks buried in graceful delivery--but his approach is so welcoming I found myself rising back to my feet for return service at every paragraph. Readers who fancy a bout of lively and uncompromising nonfiction will find a worthy opponent in these nimble inquiries about sound, tricks of memory, limitations of the body, and the varied perils of American manhood.
--Elena Passarello, author of Let Me Clear My Throat "[One With The Tiger] is exactly what literary nonfiction should be: imaginative, formally elastic, emotionally engrossing, and deeply intelligent." --LitHub

From the Publisher

10/01/2016
The idea of being attacked by wild animals has long been an area for exploration in popular culture. Church (Ultrasonic; The Guinness Book of Me) begins his latest book by introducing the story of David Villalobos, who in 2012 jumped into a Siberian tiger enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. Villalobos later called the event a "spiritual thing." There is a powerful experience that many humans seek out in placing themselves in situations that get them closer to apex predators. Documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog calls it the "gaze at moral indifference," in which the animal is merely one choice away from "making you into a meal." The author examines his own animal instincts and curiosity, purposely placing himself in bear country and discussing circumstances in which he has become "animal like" in his response to perceived physical threats. Church does well in connecting the human fascination with apex predator behavior and its potential relation to our own animal instincts. A thought-provoking argument is made as to why people seek contact with these creatures. VERDICT Those with a general interest in this topic would benefit the most from reading this captivating study.—Gary Medina, El Camino Coll., Torrance, CA

Library Journal

2016-08-21
An exploration of the fascination with the “savage and the wild inside” us, which fuels the human desire “to get intimately close to apex predators.”Church (Creative Writing/Fresno State Univ.; Ultrasonic, 2014, etc.), who admits to having an obsession with tales of “survival in the face of animal savagery,” begins with the story of David Villalobos, a 25-year-old man who, in 2012, jumped into a tiger cage at the Bronx Zoo. The author attributes the rekindling of his own adolescent preoccupation with violence and his fascination with Villalobos’ leap to his agreement to help out a fellow faculty member by “play-act[ing] the role of a bear attack victim for his beginning reporting class.” The students would then submit an eyewitness report of the incident. In order to play the role convincingly, Church researched the 1967 death of a young woman camping in Glacier National Park, which was the subject of a 2010 documentary film. Despite the brutality of such an event from the point of view of the victim, the author deplores the wide-scale killing of bears in the neighborhood of such an incident in the hope of killing the attacker. As he probed the subject in more detail, Church recognized his own morbid attraction to the thrill evoked by the possibility of such an encounter. At first, he attributes this to the “quiet vigilance and hyper-awareness required to hike in bear country,” but further self-examination led him into deeper territory, including his attraction to the violence of Mike Tyson’s boxing matches and his own potentially violent response to provocation. The author’s large frame makes him a formidable opponent, and while he reassures us that he makes every effort to keep his temper in check even when provoked, he admits the appeal of potentially violent encounters: those “fleeting moments where immortality exists, where you are most fully and completely and terrifyingly alive.” A powerfully written attention-grabber with a questionable message.

Kirkus Reviews