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Reviews by Jan Libourel

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No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History
by Dane Huckelbridge
A Mixed Package (5/27/2021)
To start with, I've read Man Eaters of Kumaon many times over the past 70 years. Jim Corbett was one of the heroes of my boyhood, and he remains so today. The parts in this book about the social, political and environmental changes that gave rise to the wave of man-eating in the early decades of the 20th century in India and Nepal were informative,even though they were slanted by a somewhat "woke" sensibility that seemed a little grating. More grating is the fact that author Huckelbridge obviously knows little to nothing about firearms. Moreover he gets some facts wrong:The most egregious of these takes place describing Corbett tracking the man-eater the day before he kills her: He senses the proximity of the tigress, he spins around and fires off both barrels of his double rifle simultaneously and scares off the tiger: "Ears ringing from the blast of the double barrels, nostrils stinging from the acrid smell of cordite, Corbett blinked through the haze...." Now you may ask, "What kind of idiot shoots his rifle empty with no discernible target, leaving him a few feet away from the most dangerous animal on earth with an empty rifle?" Well, Corbett didn't live to be almost 80 and kill many more man-eaters by being a fool! The simple answer is that he never fired his rifle! What did was to spin around pointing his rifle in the direction he thought the tigress was. She sensed he was wise to her and retreated. Sloppy, melodramatic and fictionalized work on the author's part! Still, the book was very readable and parts were informative.
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