Black Market: Inside the Endangered Species Trade in Asia

The pictures are so real, and the text is very descriptive. The best book about animal black market I've seen!

This is a superb book with easily readable text, tragic photos, and compelling stories. It has sections that alternatively focus on different geographic locations, animals, and types of problems. It also discusses some of the history of the wildlife trade. If there is a downside, it is that the book is depressing because of the scale of destruction going on. In fact, the wildlife trade is one of the largest underground markets, second only to the drug trade. But the book is a great attempt to shed more light on this dark subject.

Black Market is resoundingly successful in portraying the scale of the trade in endangered species in Asia - its roots, its cancerous growth and its callousness. Equally importantly, it shows how and why the trade can exist. What makes the book exceptional is that it is written not by an angry protester, but by a skilled journalist intent on telling the story as it is, and as accurately as possible. The book's author is not only a widely recognized photographer and journalist, but also a hard nosed economist with decades of experience in Asia. That he has managed to penetrate this black market, and emerge not only with gripping accounts of the trade but with photographs of it and the crucial local understanding to interpret its lifelines, makes for an educating read. Through a predominant use of black and white photography, the author ties the present to the past, and living traditions to ancient culture. Monochrome images portray a black trade. Colour, what we stand to lose.