How confident are you in the line between violence and peace, instinct and etiquette, the animal and the human? “One With the Tiger” blurs these lines and asks the reader to engage with prey and predator as equal impulses we face every day. The author, Steven Church is a quintessentially 1980s mid-western essayist. From his memories of Beastmaster to his conceptions of masculinity, he deconstructs his relationship to the wild and in doing so opens up his readers to reexamine just how close they are to that same ledge. The curt tone of Church’s essays betrays the depth of intimacy he gives to the reader, seamlessly shifting from pop-cultural to suicidal ideations and back again. He never sensationalizes the blood-frenzy that drips from every page of this book. Instead he, without fail, probes at the very taboo that makes violence such a sensational topic, to begin with.
In the first essay of the book, we follow Church as he retraced the steps of a young man who jumped from the Bronx Zoo monorail into the Siberian Tiger enclosure. This story is Church’s first foray into his obsession with violent encounters between man and animal and serves as a similar introduction for us as readers, begging the question “who does such a thing?” By the end of the book, we understand that all of us, if pushed, could be seduced by savagery. Sometimes we see that seduction on television like with Mike Tyson biting off the ear of his boxing opponent, and sometimes that seduction comes to us in the most ordinary places like having to stop your friend from that second kick in a bar fight, the one that would have caved the skull in.
This book is about more than violence in isolation. So often people who commit violence, against themselves or others, are stripped of their agency as humans so we as a society can comfortably return to the delusion that drugs or insanity made them this way. It’s not easy to grapple with violence as an intimate partner, something that is with us all the time but that is the work of “One With the Tiger.” This book is electric, disturbing and magnificent in its tender deconstruction of humanity and the things we are all afraid of.
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