"The author is an outdoorsman of many skills and interests.
"He is a hunter - and the book rings with evocative passages on the anticipation of the wait, the excitement of the stalk and the exultation over a clean kill.
"He is a conservationist - and the book soberly examines the indifference of all too many governments to the vital issue of wildlife preservation.
"He is, as the handsome pictures in this volume attest, a skilled photographer - and the book includes a unique section on mounting a photographic safari, which can be a rewarding alternative to hunting.
"He is, above all, a keen-eyed observer of wildlife - and the book brims with precisely wrought recollections:
"The soft Indian twilight had faded into dusk when a sixth sense warned me that I was no longer alone. Not a twig cracked. No birds or monkeys sounded an alarm as they often do. No living thing moved, and from my confined quarters in the crown of the tree I only dimly saw the carcass of a buffalo on the ground below...
"Time passed so slowly that I decided my sixth sense was all wrong. It wasn't until I capped a telephoto lens, preparatory to leaving the blind, that I saw the tiger. It appeared beside the kill below as suddenly and as silently as a figure projected onto a screen in a darkroom. A moment later it was tearing flesh from the buffalo's flank.
"The loud noise I heard was not the tiger, but my own heart pounding.
"The Treasury of Big Game Animals is an ambitious volume that will appeal to the hunter, who will glean from it firsthand descriptions of the various species, their habits and their habitats; to the armchair adventurer, who will enjoy the hundreds of remarkable color photographs and the crisp, lucid prose that Bauer employs in recounting his adventures from Afghanistan to Zanzibar; and to the student of wildlife, who will find the book a handy reference guide to the magnificent big-game animals that still roam this planet."
