Endangered, Not Gone
Can We Save the Tiger? looks at the animals teetering on the edge of extinction, and the ones that have come back from the brink, to ask what it actually takes to keep a species alive. Martin Jenkins draws on his years as a conservation biologist to explain the science of extinction and recovery in terms young readers can grasp.
A Conservationist’s Perspective
Before writing full time, Jenkins spent roughly a decade at the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge and has since worked freelance for WWF and various UN agencies, giving his conservation titles a grounding in real fieldwork.
Beyond the Tiger
Can We Save the Tiger? uses the tiger as its throughline but ranges further, into the stories of ground iguanas, partula snails, and white-rumped vultures, species most readers have never heard of, to show extinction as a pattern rather than a single crisis. Jenkins lays out the human pressures behind each decline and then profiles the real interventions working to reverse them, landing on a cautiously hopeful note about what recovery can look like. It’s pitched at roughly grades 3 to 5, dense enough to teach real conservation science without losing a young reader partway through.
Awards and Recognition
The book received a 2011 Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor for nonfiction, was named an ALA Notable Children’s Book in 2012, and appeared on School Library Journal’s and Kirkus’s Best Books of 2011 lists. It also won the NSTA/CBC Outstanding Science Trade Book award and was a finalist for the 2011 Cybils Award in nonfiction picture books.