Tiger Wars by Al Cimino

  Huge thank you to @netgalley for the free ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

Amazon

Synopsis from Goodreads: 

The global smash-hit Netflix documentary mini-series Tiger King introduced viewers to the weird, crazy and chaotic life of private zoo owner and big cat breeder Joe Exotic, and his war against Carole Baskin. Baskin, who runs the Big Cat Rescue in Florida, a sanctuary for abused and abandoned wild cats, waged a long legal battle to have Joe’s exotic animal park in Oklahoma shut down for the maltreatment of his animals. But Carole had her own dark past and Joe wasn’t going down without a fight; he responded by plotting to have her murdered. Tiger Wars delves deeper into this stranger-than-fiction tale and tells the shocking story of this big cat war, the cult-like characters involved and the spiral of obsession that landed Joe Exotic in jail and exposed the dark heart of America’s big cat obsession.

Genre? Non-Fiction

Backlist? Yes. Published September 1, 2020.

New to me Author? Yes.

What did I think? 

Like a large number of people, I spent the first part of quarantine 2020 binge-watching the Tiger King on Netflix. So I felt like I was well aware of Joe Exotic and his eccentric ways and Carole Baskin and her whole deal. I definitely did (and still do) have a strong opinion on whether Joe should be found guilty and spend time in jail or whether Carole killed her husband and fed him to the tigers. 

However, this book definitely added a huge new layer of depth to what I thought I knew. Where Tiger King, the series, skimmed the surface of what was going on behind the scenes at G.W. Park, Tiger Wars dug deep and told us even more of the scoop. The Netflix series focused a lot more on Joe being the good guy, where as Tiger Wars shows us what others in his own park thought of him. 

This book was super interesting. It dug into Joe's trial, which I knew nothing about. I would definitely recommend it if you watched the series during quarantine.